Westerners in charge of character design

>Westerners in charge of character design

god this game has awful designs. and on top of that, the fucking dreamworks face.

Is this that smash clone?

who are those qts?

>people outside of Japan using the term "westerner"

so fucking cringey lol

I knew they'd never live up to the original source material art wise, but holy shit is it so depressing to look at

>it's bad because I can't fap to it
How's puberty going?

Project M died for this.

I've seen much worse.

Could be good. Obviously tumblr infested though, so probably not.

why is that fucking face so prevalent? even overwatch is guilty of it.

Why does every character have roughly the same sci-fi themed costumes? It looks like it's hard to tell who's who in gameplay.

>Former League of Legends character artist

>gooks in charge of balance

Why can't Westerners do character design?

No but seriously, I am curious as to how you can be surrounded by so much inspiration but come up with trash every time. It's flavorless multiculti power armor trash, or it does too far in the other direction and we get Toby le quirky EPIC penguin in Battleborn.

I think Overwatch is literally the only thing produced recently that isn't bad but I am 90% sure it's asian artists behind the designs anyway. Dota 2 is also okay, but even then it's stuck in edgy demon territory much of the time.

The artist probably just did what Riot wanted, if you're gonna blame someone, blame them.

>Non-autistic people played Smash Bros because it had Nintendo characters kicking each other's asses
>Dude, let's make a shitty clone with a bunch of garbage looking characters straight out of a generic Patreon funded porn comic

>the best part of Smash is the space furries porn
>don't include any anthros in your Melee clone
???

>We need to get these characters done
>You've got a month
>You are on a temp contract
>Your pay will cover rent

Vs

>This company is your home now
>Work 14 hours a day

>this is what they killed Project M for

obsession with realism. nips and gooks treat characters like cereal box mascots where all that matters is visual impact.

No items, no personality, gameplay only, Final Destination.

You'd be amazed at how often the devs hear things along the lines of "the gameplay's fine, just replace every visual aspect"

and yet they still don't listen

I blame Nintendo, they clearly brought down the banhammer on PM but somehow had the team gagged about how it went down.
Still, like the other user said, they had tons of inspiration and they somehow shit the bed this hard.

I could have done better designs if i had the time. Better than this, anyways.

Overwatch is horrible too
TF2 is the only western game that has genuinely great character design

why do so many smash likes repeat common fighter archetypes? I would assume its because you want players who are already familiar with those playstyles transition more fluidly into a new game, but it seems silly to me since if they don't like the mechanics of said game or its not popular enough to be taken seriously, players will always have Smash to fall back on.
I don't see why you shouldn't make characters with movesets unique to them specifically so that they'd stand out more and have more of a personality than they would if they were another spacie.

They fucked up in every single aspect I can think of:


>Charm
>Coolness
>Distinctiveness
>Any sort of likeability, really
>BASIC FUCKING GAMEPLAY-SERVING VISUAL CLARITY

It's an unmitigated visual catastrophe

I mean, nips sometimes pull off understatement pretty well too.

What irritates me is that stylised western character designs almost inevitably will have details in all the wrong places.

You can see it in Icons (that's the name of the sorry-ass game this thread is about), and also for example in Wargroove (pic related, I don't think the tumblritis was even intentional)

Rehashing the same fucking archetypes is a fighting game tradition. It's just a fgc autism thing.

Contrast with Advance wars. Note how the faces don't make your fucking stomache turn, and it's not even because they're anime-ish

Overwatch
TF2
Bungie era Halo
Doom/Quake
Journey
Undertale
Witcher
God Of War (or Kratos in particular)
This list can honestly keep going on

But the thing with a list of good Japanese designs is that it starts and stops with Nintendo mainly. The rest is either awful taste like DOA or Quiet in MGSV or is just godawful moe shit. That kind of garbage far outnumbers the western AAA shitters who don't put much time into their characters. No only that, but when it comes to going for more in-depth, detailed, and complex design as opposed to just iconic simple stuff, the only relatively close competition from Japan's maybe the Silent Hill games otherwise it's just overdesigned shit for the sake of it compared to the character designs in something like Uncharted or Witcher or TLOU where you can learn a lot about certain characters with the various details of their design.

>comparing some game I have literally never heard about to Advance Wars
Damn you are so cool and smart what is your bitcoin address I want to pay for your next pocky order

This is only because the latter has a much simpler, cleaner design. Like, the earlier would be far better if they took out some of the embellishments on the faces.

i suppose i should've mentioned that wargroove is trying to be a spiritual successor to advance wars

Sort of retarded to have some ripoff made by no-names stand as the strawman to compete against a god-damn Nintendo game, huh?

I'm probably gonna get hung for this, but what's wrong with these designs? The only one I'm kind of iffy about, is the blonde one's hair.

well you'd expect them to have looked at the advance wars characters at some point and then asked themselves "why do they not look like shit?"

Does they look like brawler style melee characters to you?

I see. I see. It must be because of the hemisphere they're on. Yes, I see now, all westerners are X and all easterners are Y! This is a very intellectual conclusion we have reached and it is not retarded at all. You definitely draw.

nah i just think they wanted it to be more detailed and less animu and they fucked up royally

Nope, it sort of looks like a sci-fi game. Then again, none of the characters in smash-bros scream brawler to me when I look at them. Are there full body images to see the rest of the design?

see

>awful generic "e-sports" designs
>awful generic "e-sports" announcer
>awful generic sound effects
>gameplay just looks like watered down Melee with push-block

Why.

With the smash-like genre you've got a completely clean slate for character design, there are no real genre standards.
All the more reason why these characters are fucking appallingly bad. They somehow managed to combine the worst elements of League and Dreamworks into one
Inspiration could easily have been drawn from 2D platformers and fighters, as far as the whole "visuals follow the gameplay" thing goes.

fucking horrible

>Easterners in charge of character design

tumblr art looks grotesque because the faces are drawn with too much detail compared to the overall cartoon style. the nose and the mouth end up looking overemphasized making the characters look like clowns or nigger caricatures.

I would have looked for inspiration from akira toriyama, ayumi kojima, ONE, Arika(and by extension 90's capcom) and tatsunoko productions. Huge variety of character designs spanning decades. But they decided to go the easy "lets just copy blizzard" route. Icons could have been something special. Show the world that someone other than nintendo can make a good smash game. Looks like we're just gonna have to keep waiting.