Having talked with a former coworker on the dev team, it was supposed to be F2P except that management changed their mind in the last year. It was designed a more of a Counterstrike/Valorant style game, but again the lead designers pivoted in the last year to more casual. 4 characters had years of design done for them, but the rest came in hot with a lot of complaints internally as they failed to have distinct silhouettes and were not recognizable in fast paced gameplay. Designers didn’t listen to feedback thinking they knew best even after the horrible playtest.

Lastly, tremendous amount of time, effort, and money went into the cinematics. They had a year of cinematics backlog made. The reason for this is suspect, but my friend said the cinematic director was sleeping with the game director (married at the time) and received three promotions in the space of the year to creative director.

If you want to make a year of cinematics, locking down the look of the entire roster early and with no room to pivot is what happens. Characters had to be rushed to make movies for them and then they couldn’t change since their “look” was locked in.

Ignoring the gossip about the affair, that alone would cause your character design to be flawed. Using the Sony Motion Capture studio is expensive and probably also another reason the additional characters were just generic humanoid as you don’t have the cash to do motion capture for extreme body types.

Why someone thought a multiplayer game needed weekly movies is beyond me.