Just dumping a lot of random, unorganized thoughts on this game that no one is playing. I have played Concord for three and a half hours, which I imagine puts me in the top 150 players in the world. So, I feel uniquely qualified to talk about Concord.
This game is Fine. It is completely Okay and Serviceable. It is growing on me as I play it and figure out strategies for the various characters, but I still think the game would have sold only an Okay amount if Sony had a more competent marketing team. I think its biggest problem is that none of the marketing communicated any of the game’s core ideas that could potentially give it an identity, and I think the game itself also does a bad job of surfacing those ideas too. I’m doing a lot of “oh, I think I see what they are going for” rather than going “aha, this is pretty cool!”
There are a few things that I think are supposed to be the game’s main ideas:
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There are no currencies. This is not a F2P style GAAS game. It has progression and leveling systems, but there are no battle passes, no microtansactions to buy progressions levels, or currencies. It has modern style “levels” for your account and each individual character to unlock new things, but it’s not tuned to make you spend money. It’s nice to not have that pressure over your head constantly, and not have to constantly be aware that everything about the game is designs to make you spend endless amounts of money. There is supposed to be a cosmetics store at some point though.
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Variants. The game has 16 characters at launch, but as you level up your account/characters, you unlock new variations of characters that occupy their own character slot. The only variant I have so far has a new passive ability for that character. So potentially the game could build some roster variety by just tweaking characters into new variants rather than having to design whole new characters. The game is supposed to be releasing any characters for free, so no needing to buy characters with real money like modern GAAS games either.
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Crew abilities. Every character has a class, as is typical nowdays, and every class has an associated crew ability. This ability becomes a permanent buff for your entire crew on your new respawn. So if you choose a tactician character, who has the crew ability of Faster Reloading (I think), after you die, all characters you play going forward with have faster reload speeds. There are five classes, so you can potentially stack all five buffs (these abilities are things like longer weapon range, less recoil, faster dodge ability cooldowns, and better healing).
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The crewbuilder system. The game has 16 characters, and some number of variants, but you can only take 12 characters with you into a match. So you make a “crew”/deck of characters that will comprise your roster for your matches. Variants count as individual characters, over time you’ll conceptually have a large pool of characters+variants to choose from. In actual matches, you’ll only have access to your chosen 12 characters, plus four extra character slots that seem to rotate its roster every round.
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Abilities that leave effects in the environment persist even when you change characters. So if you play the mushroom guy who can leave spore pods that buff your defense and movement speeds, you leave a huge trail of them, die, then switch characters and use that same trail of spore pods to get back into the action faster. If you drop a radar that makes enemies appear on the hud, you can switch characters and everyone on your team can still use that radar.
This spot is this map’s first chokepoint, and I left all these spores here two rounds ago. They’re all stacking buffs on top of each other now because the enemy team has never destroyed any of them.
- There are a couple of character with healing abilities, but overall the game seems designed around needing to find and pickup healthdrops on the map. They’re always shown on the map. None of the healing abilities are strong enough to sustain someone under fire, and those abilities have cooldowns too.
Most of these ideas don’t make any meaningful impact until you unlock the Rivalry matchmaking playlist, which consists of game modes that have no respawns, are round based, have a character pick phase, and have more typical objective-based FPS three-lane map designs. The game modes are played in best 4-out-of-9 rounds. Additionally, when you win a round, for the rest of the match you can no longer play the character you were playing from the round you won. This is where the game’s ideas really start to work.
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You always spawn in the same place on these maps at round start, as opposed to the other game modes where you have semi-random respawn locations. So persistent environmental abilities have way more impact because you can plan their placement for utilization in all future rounds. That spore ability that makes you move faster? You can place those in round one so you can get a speedboost towards objective points at the start of future rounds. That radar? You can drop it in one lane and then know whenever an enemy has gone there in a future round without you needing to spot them.
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Because there are a limited number of rounds, and you potentially lose access to characters over the course of the match, picking your characters is more important. You need to decide what crew abilities you want for the early game and what character “builds” you want to have built for the end game. Character variants gain more usefulness as well, because you can put multiple variants of the same character on your crew so you can keep using a character even if one of the variants gets locked out during the match.
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You can see what characters the enemy team picked at all times on the HUD from the start of the round, so you have a lot of info to strategize against your enemies every round.
There is more thought put into these characters’ kits than their bland designs entail.
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There’s a grenade launcher lady who shoots bouncing grenades that leave flammable oil balls everywhere the grenade bounces. When on fire, that oil ball turns into a damage-over-time AOE fire trap for a fair amount of time. Her two abilities are 1)a flaming dart that can ignite the oil, and 2)a big bomb that splashes self-igniting oil balls into an area. So she can setup oil traps, ignite them, and create a big fire pit. But wait! You can also just shoot your grenades through any of those fires, igniting your grenades and making them leave active fires everywhere the grenade bounces instead of just oil balls. Now she can start splashing fire everywhere, at long distance, and keep it going as long as she can angle her shots through or around existing fires.
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There’s a big bruiser guy with a shotgun who has an ability to do a running sprint while buffing his defense. The first idea you’d probably have is to charge into someone’s face and shoot them with the shotgun. But this is also super useful for quickly running into danger, picking up an objective, and running out of there as fast as possible.
All that said, this also means most of these “differentiators” don’t really work as differentiators until you’ve committed to playing enough to unlock the Rivalry matchmaking playlist, and even then those differentiators make of their impact only when playing those Rivalry modes, and not the other 2/3 of the game’s modes. And some of those ideas don’t work as well as the game wants them to.
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The crewbuilding system has no impact unless you have enough characters to choose from that you actually have to make hard choice. You have 12 character slots in your crew, and matches gives you an extra 4 “free” slots of rotating characters. The game only has 16 characters, so from the outset there are no decisions to make. You only unlock the crewbuilding system after you’ve leveled up your account enough, but even then you’re only given one variant at that point. You only have to choose which single character/variant you don’t want to have access to at that point. This system will have no impact until you’ve unlocked tons of variants, and that does not happen fast enough. It neuters the entire concepts until the game has built a large mass of characters + variants. I have no idea how many variants are in the game, or how long it takes to unlock all of them.
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Persistent environmental abilities aren’t as interesting in the infinite-respawn game modes, which is 2/3 of the game, because you have semi-random spawn points that change based on where action is happening. So you can’t rely on being able to utilize them as easily as you can in the Rivalry modes.
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If crewbuilding, variants, and the Rivalry game modes are the core of the game, locking all those until you’ve played a lot of the game means you’re playing a more boring version of the game until you’ve committed enough time to unlock those modes. With how the game is performing, I won’t be surprised if the game is patched to unlock those from the beginning of the game.
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You can save numerous crew loadouts, but you can’t name them yourself. You can only choose from a list of 70 pre-set names. What in the world is with that decision?
I think the dev team are always advertised as former Bungie devs, and you can feel it in the gunplay and aesthetics. It’s got the same kinds of color palletes and sterile environmental design. But man these character designs do not stand out. You look at them up close and… they maybe have an ideas? But putting these character together and their colors just visually blend together. They do not stand out from each other. No one has an presence.
Hey, I unlocked a cosmetic in that last match! Let me go see what it is! It’s… something no one will ever see.
The game is not able to make the characters interesting, but the devs clearly tried. It’s got expensive cutscenes that seem to be planned to be unlocked every week about a bunch of these dudes hanging out on a space ship! It’s trying to be like One Piece space! And there’s a big world map with lots and lots of encylopedia text for the world. And there’s like some big galaxy ending threat in there. And so much writing. Clearly they were trying for something, but the final result ended up with characters no one has any interest in.
This is an actual character design in the game.
Why’s this the screen for all the character customization have just this one space that’s reserved for future use? It makes the game feel unfinished rather than a “tease” for… some unknown potential function?
I am very curious why a competitive FPS like this included an auto-walk option. I wonder what the practical usage for that is in a game like this.
At least the box art looks decent.
of a game.
