Concord
Sony tried to jam 14 games into a 30 minute PlayStation State of Play event, but gave a lot more time to one in particular. There were about ten minutes solely devoted to Concord, a new 5v5 hero shooter which opened with a lengthy CG cutscene before moving into gameplay and developer explanation of the concept.
Fans are…not amused.
The reception to Concord has ranged from muted to quite bad. The most common complaint is general exhaustion with the concept of hero shooters in general, but especially one that looks to channel Overwatch pretty directly with another string of sci-fi heroes and robots.
To gauge the reception you can look at the replies to social media posts, or you can head to YouTube where the trailers are badly underwater in terms of likes and dislikes. The cinematic reveal trailer has 2.5K likes to 8.4K dislikes. The gameplay trailer is even worse, 2.8K likes to 13K dislikes.
Personally, I get it. I do not think it made a good impression whatsoever. The initial cinematic very much feels like off-brand Guardians of the Galaxy in every way possible. And the hero shooter gameplay seems impossibly generic. Maybe it feels good to play, but it seems like a game that was conceived the moment Overwatch came out, but now five years later appears impossibly dated. Additionally, it’s not launching as free-to-play either.
The game is from Firewalk, a studio Sony picked up in 2023 when they were in the midst of “building a new IP from the ground up.” This is that IP.
Despite this reception for Concord, it’s clear simply being a hero shooter and an Overwatch clone is not a guarantee to get you lambasted online. There has been a much more positive reception for NetEase’s Marvel Rivals, a hero shooter that quite literally is the closest thing to a mainstream Overwatch clone I’ve ever seen down to the UI and level design. But it’s full of Marvel heroes and villain with superpower-based character kits, and that’s been enough to get many fans excited. The console announce trailer that debuted in the same showcase yesterday drew 4.9K likes to 130 dislikes, in contrast to Concord.
I think a lot of it is just how the Concord IP looks. Marvel gets more of a free pass with decades-established characters, but fair or not, it is almost impossible for any game to debut with a “cool” slate of unknown hero characters in 5v5 matches and make a significant impression now. In this case, channeling Guardians of the Galaxy so directly did not help either.
Again, the main thing will be how it plays, and like other Sony live games, it will launch day and date on PC to try to expand its playerbase. But it clearly has a very tall mountain to climb to convince players it is in fact worthwhile. Concord will be out in August of this year.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
