Concord, a Post-Mortem: as terrible as it seemed or a victim of untimely decisions?

Today, on Friday, September 6, 2024, Sony officially pulled the plug on its latest live-service venture after only two weeks from its release. Firewalk Studios’ 5v5 competitive multiplayer hero shooter, Concord, was released to very little fanfare, failing to catch the attention of audiences on PlayStation 5 and Steam like other similar exclusives had managed to do so.

As such, it leaves behind no trace of it ever having existed apart from the myriad of criticism online from reviews, memes, and social media posts dismissing the title. Reportedly, the game only managed to sell approximately 25,000 copies in total, while its player base was even lower than that, not managing to break the 1000 concurrent player mark on Steam. This in turn resulted in dwindling player counts and not enough players to sustain a healthy matchmaking service even for those players who bought and actively enjoyed the game while it lasted.

The game came and went in such a flash that we weren’t even able to publish an official review, as its live-service nature dictated that we had to play the game “live”, so as to see how it performed for every player. So, with its “years-long” amount of content and weekly vignettes cut short to only the content at launch at 2 short cutscenes that only barely scratched the surface of the universe promised by the developers and by Sony, what was actually there before Concord got shut down?

To our surprise, there were the foundations of a promising multiplayer shooter, but one that never even got a chance to shine due to weak designs, a shocking focus on the wrong kind of content, and even worse marketing efforts that buried whatever good there was in the game.

The world of Concord could have been great

With claims of the game being in development “in some form” for over 8 years, one would have to ask themselves just what the world of Concord was supposed to be. Firewalk Studios was acquired by Sony only last year, with an announcement of the acquisition being made on April of 2023. Then, a month later, the first teaser for Concord showcasing a sandwhich and the interior of a spaceship was released.

No further details were given, leaving players to theorize on what it was supposed to be. With Xbox and Microsoft hyping up the release of Starfield at the time, many supposed that Concord was supposed to be an answer to Bethesda’s then-upcoming title, but no further announcements were made.

The following year, Sony broke the seal and finally revealed what Concord was supposed to be on May 2024′s State of Play: A CGI trailer was presented that made it feel very much like a “Guardians of the Galaxy”-like adventure, with some cringy characters, but still a promising sci-fi romp seeimngly about heists throughout the galaxy made by a rag-tag group of misfits. But those hopes were dashed almost immediately when the developers appeared on screen and started talking about the competitive shooter part of the game.

The promise of a narrative was there at all times, but other than that what was shown had an extremely negative response from the audience. From complaints about ugly designs to groans about “yet another hero shooter” at a time when the genre is overflowing with games of all shapes and sizes. Perhaps it was the disappointment of finding out what Concord truly was, or the pain of losing what hopeful fans had imagined the game would be like after a year of silence.

But was it always supposed to be like this? While the game was “in development” for 8 years, as its creators claimed, Firewalk Studios only came to exist six years ago, when it was created under ProbablyMonsters Inc. The studio has no other titles under its belt, so it’s safe to assume that from its inception the team got to work on Concord. At the same time, Sony was shifting their PlayStation release plan to depend almost entirely on a variety of live-service games.

So then when we looked at the game that we got to enjoy for barely two weeks, a question that has become much too common in recent years popped into our heads…

Was Concord something else entirely before it was a 5v5 live-service hero shooter?

The signs of greatness and passion were clear as day when you actually got your hands on Concord: From the retro-futuristic stylings of its main menu to the insane amount of detail on each and every single character in the game, exceedingly simple and ugly designs or not, the game looked absolutely stunning in a way that is hard to explain if you’ve only seen the highly compressed trailers that are found online.

The studio is comprised of veterans who have worked on all sorts of big-name shooters, from Call of Duty and Halo to Destiny and Apex Legends. The people who worked on this game know their shooters and the gameplay shows this very well. While each character only has a singular loadout of weapons, each gun in the game feels weighty and tight. The controls were highly responsive and easy to understand, with the movement in the game having much more depth than what we were able to explore. With 14 unique characters at the time of launch divided into 5 categories that went above the common trifecta of “tank, DPS, support” that we’re used to seeing in games, there were the makings of something extremely interesting.

This was all made more obvious when you got into the “Rivalry” playlist, which gathered all of the modes in which there were no respawning, and instead games took place over rounds with a depleting pool of heroes to choose from. Items placed in a round could persist in following encounters in the same match, and your selection of characters would activate bonuses for future rounds. There was a level of strategy that isn’t seen so often in the shooter genre, and we’re convinced that had it been available as the main focus of the title from the moment you launched the game, it would have built a strong player base.

Instead, what you got at the beginning was typical live-service bloat locked behind an admittedly low-level cap. You only needed to reach level 6 to unlock this playlist, but before doing so you would be forced to match in simple “capture and control” or deathmatch games. It didn’t help that after every match you were kicked off to the main menu, forcing you to suffer long matchmaking times every time you wanted to play. It was competitive, tense, and interesting, but it was killed off without any chance to develop.

What we’re trying to say is that the game was absolutely decent. The main gameplay loop was snappy and fun, and it was easy to get involved in exciting battles at times. When you had a full team that communicated it was even better, but finding a match was hard enough already. If the gameplay was good, and the production value in the title was extraordinary (the few cutscenes that were in the game have outstanding acting and animation, even if limited to the inside of a ship), what went wrong?

We’d like to point directly at the biggest, most impossible-to-ignore elephant in the room: The Galactic Guide. Presented at the start of the game as an incredibly important item and concept, tangled deeply with the lore of the universe, this thing served no real purpose to the game. It got its own entry in the main menu of the title, btu when going into it what you find is a map you can scroll around, where there are several nodes you can hover over to get information about planets, characters, factions, and historic events of a world that no longer exists.

And we don’t mean it doesn’t exist because the game is now gone! No, the entire game kicked off making glaring hints at a grand story that had already happened. A Guild that controlled space lanes and oppressed the people, tales of a legendary crew that fought against them to liberate the world. Of rival crews and starships, and a wide variety of species and creatures, crime cartels and organizations, and the massive amounts of potential that comes from such a deeply developed universe. If you went into the Galactic Guide you could find a novel’s worth of lore written down just waiting to be read. But none of it truly mattered for the game that we got.

Even the CGI trailer that was presented before the game’s reveal suggested villains and rivals, but these are nowhere to be seen in the final game. There are no heists, no annoying rivals, no exciting escapes through alien cities that end in a last stand… Instead, we only got a barebones (if fairly well-built) hero shooter…

This is why we have to wonder if Concord was something completely different before the studio got acquired by Sony at a time when then-CEO Jim Ryan’s entire strategy was releasing 12 or more live-service games to bleed PlayStation gamers dry, and leaving single-player and narrative titles as second-tier releases. Was Concord once a galaxy-spanning adventure about the crew of the Northstar actually going on adventures? Was it supposed to be more of a co-op heist game, in the style of Helldivers or even PayDay 2? Or is this simply a case of the studio being pushed to release way before they’re done with the game, leading to the glaring omissions in the title (like the two sides of every match being “The Valiant Crew of the Northstar” versus… “rivals”).

Now the one question in our minds is whether or not the incredibly skilled developers at Firewalk are in a stable situation, or if the studio is at risk of being shut down. Let alone what will happen to Concord, our thoughts are with the team who clearly poured everything they had into a doomed venture. If you’re reading this, the work you did shone through as soon as you jumped into the game, and had it received more support we would have been looking at a different situation.

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