So, I found these in one of DB’s character designer’s art pages, clearly labeled as “various items I did for Dirty Bomb”.
It definitely looks like stoker, so originally I figured it was some cut obsidian design for him, but considering this was posted 4 months after stoker’s actual obsidian was I’m not so sure. This character also seems to have dark skin, which obviously doesn’t fit stoker, even for an obsidian redesign.
So what’s up with this?
Yeah, I’d still think it was just a cut Obsidian design. It was probably just sitting around in a file somewhere on his computer. Or maybe Splash Damage just finally gave him clearance to even post the picture, considering how stingy they can be with their NDA’s sometimes.
Looks awesome. Don’t ask me how, but it reminds me of a cross between a Halo Grunt and Quake Strogg.
That’s pretty normal tbh. Most videogame models start out as high poly, super detailed models before minor details and bumps can be baked into textures and the model can be simplified.
Just look at this high poly model of Phantom’s obsidian or Guardian’s glove on the guy’s page:
https://cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/007/656/401/large/ji-ruan-zb-screenshot.jpg?1507651302
https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/007/656/874/large/ji-ruan-glove.jpg?1507653521
Although that said, I’m not sure if that stoker helmet would translate well into a low poly model. Unlike Phantom’s obsidian or Guardian’s glove which are mostly just cloth detail, which is fairly easy to bake in, this one has a lot of parts that couldn’t easily be turned into a bumpmap
Looking at the 2 pictures without the protective “bubble”, the shape of the underlying mask (especially the wavy top edge and eyes) is nearly identical to Stoker’s default mask, no way this was designed for another merc:
The guy also did the actual Stoker Obsidian, so it makes sense taht he would have worked on alternate designs as well. I’m not a fan of the “cyborgized” Obsidian, but considering where SD went with all the recent ones, I’m surprised they didn’t go with that design rather than the slasher movie skull-faced thing we got… It would have been a much better fit with the other misfits.
I suspect it just didn’t translate well when in-game, probably looked like Sloth from The Goonies on low settings.
Maybe it’s a future competitive/Ranked reward skin?
Thoughts on competitive rewards in general? Are they good for the game?
Idk, seems a bit over the top considering we still have a lot of mercs with no obsidians whatsoever.
Also rewards aren’t bad by themselves, it’s always fun to have something to work towards. You just have to be careful to avoid too many people playing exclusively for the rewards and not because they enjoy playing, like last season of ranked basically was
A few ideas I’ve heard for separating the people that just pay for rewards and the people that want to be competitive include only giving the awards to a certain or better (like Gold+) and the one I came up with was having a competitive-format but not ranked mode that gives the same rewards.
Speaking of that since 1.0 is suppose to be next week, I wonder if SD are planning another obsidian yet.
@STARRYSOCK Ah fella it was in the comments below, he replied to someone who asked a question 
