Going to be honest, I jumped into this convo having seen the initial trailer and plenty of footage of the gameplay but without ever having looked at the character designs up close, I just knew they were poorly received.
But looking at them
here, wow... it's not good.
Emari in particular looks like something the Xcom 2 random generator would throw out there, Roka too. These look like the roughest of first efforts at a modern character design, but they were in the oven for 8 years.
There seems to be a commitment to off-beat colour palettes, with many characters having tan or olive paired with something bright like magenta. Magenta and teal in particular show up way, way too often. There are very few traditionally attractive characters, the focus appears to have been on making them look like believably real people. And none of the characters save 1-Off and maybe DaVeers pass the silhouette test. A high-personality robot is a design most games manage to nail, but here... it's just a vacuum cleaner with no face, no expression. Hell, Daw looks like a fan won a competition to get put into the game. He's got a visor! And... gloves...!
I'm looking at these designs and wondering what parts of the standard multiplayer gaming demographic each is supposed to appeal to and I can only see maybe 4 of them hitting home at all. Just very strange.
It really makes me wonder if these standard designs were made so that future skins would be more appealing as a result. That the story would build the appeal of the character, and then when they roll out the "real" skins, people would feel obliged to get their fav character out of the mess of a costume they're originally in.
EDIT: Shit, just thought of something else. If you thought Steam CCU threads were bad enough already (and I never take part) then now with the precedent that a game can just be disappeared after 10 days if the failure is big enough, the excitement over any potential failure will be bigger than ever. There will be bad actors trying to will this into happening again.
