Concord? More like Boeing!

 Get it? Because they... mess up a lot... and are bad... Boeing? The planes? Like... like Concord...

Concord was not exactly a soaring superstar of the PlayStation conference when it was announced by Playstation as one of the unlucky survivors of their recent Live Service purge. Although, you might call it a 'lucky' survivor, given that Concord seems to be a game built from the ground-up to fit into the Live Service mould by a 'Firewalk Studios' who presented such an impressive vision of what they wanted the game to be when they showed it off to Sony that the entire studio got acquired. But when you ask what the special spark of that Quirky-character hero shooter actually was, you'll likely get blank stares from the swathes of people who simply saw Overwatch 3.0 with Guardians of the Galaxy character archetypes and simply rolled their eyes out of their skulls. But I actually think I know what they were going for.

Overwatch's biggest failure is it's wide inability to capitalise on it's lore. Rich and potent but utterly disregarded in favour of a PVP game which directly contrasts with the setting presented- Overwatch exists more fluidly in the hearts of those that play it than on the screen itself- and after the cancellation of the single player mode for Overwatch 2 gamers just seemed to reach their breaking point of waiting. If Blizzard don't care enough to see the potential of this franchise hit it's zenith, then why should they? And I suspect it was exactly this gap that Concord sought to profit from. Because what exactly does Concord do unique? What does it do differently? One thing- it promises to provide weekly cinematics expanding the lore of the world for however long it can. (I suspect it's meant to be seasonal.) And if Overwatch did something similar- well, I would have watched them all back in the day. But... it isn't 'the day' anymore, you get me?

We're no longer in that space where imagining about the potential of Live Service games elicits anything but grumbling dissatisfaction over the ongoing state of the genre-type. The 'wonder' about quirky characters and wanting to see who they are, where they go and what they become kinda died at the hands of Blizzard themselves who seems to assert that their insanely colourful cast isn't worthy of any extrapolation beyond zany phrases uttered during matches or the odd exchange back and forth at the start of some games. To this day a lot of the big lore about interpersonal character relationships are informed solely by interpretations of these tiny snippets- and you know how unhinged the Internet is! They've convinced themselves that Pharah and Mercy are in an intense BDSM relationship! You simply can't expand complex character personalities in such a limited space!

What's more, Concord really is stepping into a very dangerous ring by announcing itself not as a free-to-play title, but rather as a $40 game- a business model all but unheard of with modern competitive games that aren't Call of Duty. With games like these that need to scoop up as many players as possible, the more barriers to entry you present the harder it is to build up that audience. Overwatch pulled it off in a different age with a vastly different public sentiment, Concord really is giving itself the hard path to success aping it's progress. Although I really do think the game needs that buy in money- afterall creating high quality animations to air on the weekly isn't exactly simple 'half ass' style content. They really are stuck between that rock and that hard place.

And it would seem that all the mixed feelings around Concord are coming to fruit given the recent pre-release numbers the game has generated courtesy of two Betas. The first Beta launched to horrifically bad numbers, less than 2000 players which quickly dwindled- indicating a particularly weak number of pre-orders to get into the closed beta. And the recent open beta, for which you need absolutely nothing in order to play the game, hit just under 2400. Abominable numbers for a game like this reflective of the very real fact that no one is talking about Concord in the general gamer spaces. No one cares about this game. If people won't even show up when the game is out there for free- what do you think the numbers will look like come launch?

Those who have actually taken time to play Concord seem mixed to unsatisfied with the game. The game's basic layout both fails to inspire anyone bored with this style of game and satisfy those who are enfranchised with it. Most notably in the gameplay department seems to be the utterly hair-brained idea to make a 'character elimination' style mode for Ranked which prevents players from re-selecting any character they've won a round with- essentially forcing players to play every other character rather than the one they main during important 'Ranked' sessions. To call that misguided is one thing, I'd go so far as to label it straight oblivious.

Then there are just the general characters themselves that don't seem essentially badly designed by any stretch of the imagination but just- unoriginal. We've seen these archetypes present before and even throwing impressive visual character designs atop them does little to mask the impression that we've seen this all before and Concord has nothing new to bring to the table. Which is especially sad considering that Concord is relying on you caring about it's cast in order to be drawn in by the promise of new animatics every few weeks or so. If you don't care about the cast, what does any of that actually mean?

Concord seems to be yet another Live Service set to launch to a world that doesn't want it. And although we have aficionados of the genre-type like Warframe insisting that these kinds of games are abandoned far too soon- I think for a lot of these games you really can see the writing on the wall. Suicide Squad was dead on arrival, before arrival in fact. The public just doesn't want these kinds of games unless they strike with lightning, because the amount of investment they demand from the player, in terms of time, defies common reason. Now I really don't think Concord is overall a bad product- I just think it is perhaps landing at a terrible time for games like it- and I think it sucks how much genuinely good work is going to be lost when this game is left to shrivel and then shut off in a year or two.