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Brace yourself: A new wave of hero shooters is rolling in. Dozens of videos of a rumored Valve shooter called Deadlock have leaked over the past couple weeks, and now Sony has revealed Concord, a character-driven PvP shooter releasing this August.
Concord comes from Firewalk Studios, a developer Sony brought into the PlayStation fold last year. In the past, that would’ve meant no PC version for us, but these days Sony is releasing its multiplayer games on PS5 and PC simultaneously—see Helldivers 2—and that’ll be true for Concord.
Fans of Destiny 2’s PvP modes might find something familiar feeling about the gameplay trailer above, which was shown at Sony’s State of Play showcase today. The Firewalk crew is stacked with ex-Bungie developers: Concord game director Ryan Ellis, design director Josh Hammrick, lead gameplay designer Claude Jerome, and lead character designer Jon Weisnewski all worked on Destiny 2.
At first, though, it wasn’t clear that this even was a PvP game: the Concord gameplay trailer was preceded by a lengthy cinematic trailer (embedded below) full of very Guardian’s of the Galaxy-ish movie banter. I assumed we were looking at a singleplayer adventure game, but nope, Concord is a “5v5 character-driven, first-person multiplayer shooter,” as Ellis describes it.
The 16 characters are mercenaries called “Freegunners,” and the gameplay trailer shows them doing the things we’ve come to know hero shooter heroes to do: jetpacking, slam attacking, smoke grenading, saying quips.
One interesting detail is that the effects of some Freegunners’ abilities will persist across rounds. A wall deployed in round one, for instance, could still be standing in round two.
“Some Freegunners’ abilities are made for in-the-moment tactics, including casting walls of fire, throwing exploding knives, or lobbing trash bombs,” said Ellis. “Others can have an enduring impact on a match, like deployable walls that can block entire lanes, explosive traps, bullet-blocking domes, speed-granting spores, and more that persist across rounds and respawns. “
I’ve always thought it would be funny (if not necessarily fun) to play a version of Rainbow Six Siege where the destruction is persistent across rounds, so that by the end you’re fighting over the skeleton of a building. This isn’t nearly as dramatic or silly as that, but I think Firewalk Studios and I are on the same wavelength as far as thinking it’s a cool idea.
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Also interesting is how Concord will be showing us the lives of its characters (multiplayer shooters have stories these days, if you haven’t kept up). Firewalk Studios promises weekly in-game “cinematic vignettes” that “will feature ongoing narrative arcs that grow the characters’ stories, relationships, and unpack the broader Concord galaxy and life as a Freegunner.” Sounds sort of like Fortnite’s seasonal stories, except delivered in more frequent, bite-sized chunks.
To be honest, I was mentally mashing the ‘skip cutscene’ button during the cinematic portion of the reveal—just too MCU-cute for me—but I like a lot about the environments and character designs. The bright colors are reminiscent of pulp sci-fi covers of the ’50s. I also like the idea of an Overwatch-style game where the characters have less health. The average time-to-kill here looks quite a bit lower.
Concord is scheduled to release on PC and PS5 on August 23, 2024, and a beta is planned for July. I assume the PC version will be on Steam, like Helldivers 2, but heads up: a PlayStation Network account will be required from the get go, according to the gameplay trailer’s YouTube description.