Impressions from the Concord beta. An attempt at success

For pre-order holders, PlayStation Plus subscribers, and Sony journalists, they tested their new game — Concord. This is a multiplayer shooter similar to popular games of this genre. We’ve played it and are going to share our general impressions and tell you if it’s worth your attention.

A strange new world

In the closed beta, all 16 characters and four maps for four game modes were available. But first of all, Concord is greeted with two story trailers. In the first one video the heroes on their ship Northstar are waiting for confirmation of their status «Freegunner», for which they performed rather dubious tasks.In the second video we are told the story of the creation of Freegunners. At one time, all space travel routes were controlled by the Guild. The organization owned a map of travel. Members of the «Relentless» crew stole this map at the cost of their lives and made it public, but only for members of the «Freegunners» club.

The developers promise that with the release of the game, they will release a small video every week telling another story of the North Star team members, their adventures, and the world they live in. In just two short videos, the developers managed to get me interested in the game’s lore. I even want a story-driven game where the writers could go all out because no matter how great the story is, it is constrained by the game’s network orientation.

The question of the availability of the lore for new players in a month or two or ten after the game’s release remains open. Currently, there is no option in the game menu to view the available videos, and it seems like a dubious idea to go to Youtube specifically for this purpose.

In the long run, the idea of a weekly video release may turn into a good space sitcom, perhaps even in the best traditions of Firefly. But for this to happen, in addition to a good script, the game must become successful, and there are doubts about this.On the other hand, Concord is a multiplayer game, which means that learning about lore and history is optional. The first thing a new player will have to deal with is learning the characters and maps.

Deep space

Four maps were available for play on three different planets, which affects their style and overall atmosphere. More importantly, the maps are designed in an interesting way and with the vertical movement of characters in mind. At a minimum, each location will have elevations and lowlands, tall boxes, buildings with missing doors, and basements.

One of the maps, Star Chamber, has a «arena» design, i.e. it is symmetrical for both teams with a central area for direct confrontation. Of the available maps, it is probably the most vertically oriented.

Despite the fact that the maps have a large number of passages, alleys, and nooks and crannies, they are learned quite quickly. 2-3 runs are enough to get to know the location well and navigate where you can escape, catch your breath, or get treatment

Beyond the abilities of the characters, treatment is performed by picking up first aid kits scattered around the map. Some of them are hidden in safe places, and some in open areas, which often become the epicenter of fierce shootings.

There were two modes in the Brawl category: the classic Team Deathmatch (TDM) and TDM with kill confirmation. That is, by picking up a token on the enemy’s corpse. In both modes, heroes are constantly revived, and the battle lasts for 10 minutes or up to 30 deaths. Both modes are well known to everyone who has played online shooters at least once.The Rivalry category also allows you to play in two modes, but this time the characters do not respawn after death during the round. The game lasts until you win in four rounds. After winning, the heroes with which we won the round are blocked.

In Cargo Run, you need to pick up «teddy bear» and bring it to one of two points while waiting for the object to evacuate. Or kill all opponents. This plot was shown in the game’s cinematic announcement trailer. In the second mode, Clash Point, the team that is the first to capture the area in the center of the map or, again, kill the enemies wins.

Each character has two active abilities, one passive ability, and evasion variations. For example, the character It-Z is a single ability that launches a sphere that negatively affects enemy weapons. When the sphere returns to the heroine, it strengthens her weapon for a few seconds. Another ability is teleportation. With one button, we release the sphere, and with a second press, we teleport to her. The heroine has low health, so this mobility compensates for this drawback.

Heroes are divided into «Tanks», «Support», «Attackers», and «Initiators». At the same time, there are no «purebred» class representatives, such as Mercy from Overwatch, in Concord. Even healing-oriented characters can easily fight off the enemy under certain conditions. However, from the experience of playing, it became clear that support characters are indispensable and are fully revealed only in a team, and possibly in certain modes. In particular, in those that do not have instant revival after death In TDM variations, when the team is scattered across the map in search of the enemy (and often their own death). The Star Child (a blue giant with a red head) left alone becomes easy prey for any character operating at medium range, as its power is in close combat. But in modes and maps that concentrate the battle in one point, this character can be extremely useful.

In addition to the fact that characters have different abilities and different dynamics that directly depend on their size. Big heroes literally look down on the world. Heavy robots can’t jump high, so they can’t reach tall boxes and shortcuts to the heights of the location. And they move much slower than others. Armored characters don’t even know how to dodge.

From a game design perspective, the characters evoke only positive emotions. There is no feeling that any of them are useless or made just to fill the set of characters with quantity.

For example, one character can set up sensors that detect enemies, then replace him with a mushroom-like creature that places spores within the radius of which allied heroes receive a bonus and enemies a penalty. After that, replace it with some third character, and the sensors and spores will remain on the map until they are destroyed by the enemies. This mechanic works in synergy with the following.

The mechanics of the «Group Bonus» became interesting and new to me. It works as follows. Each hero has a certain bonus: faster reloading of weapons, better mobility, or reduced recoil when shooting.

When changing characters, the bonus of the previous one remains with us. This way you can compensate for the shortcomings of your favorite characters. I really liked the character Haymar (the one who shoots fireballs), but her crossbow takes a long time to reload. So I first take a character that has a faster reload bonus, and when I die, I change it to Haymar. In this way, you can collect six bonuses. However, the same bonuses do not stack.

One of the conditional disadvantages of this mechanic is that skilled fighters who do not die cannot change their character in TDM, so the bonuses will not work for them. On the other hand, such skilled warriors probably don’t need them.

Concord also allows you to create your own set of characters for battles. The idea is simple: we assemble our own set of 12 Freegunners, or their copies. Each set must have at least five unique characters. Additional characters in the set (reinforcements) are added randomly by the game and rotate. Reinforcement characters can be from one to four, depending on the player’s reputation (profile). Thus, the maximum number of heroes available for selection during the battle reaches sixteen.

In traditional TDM, copies are meaningless because characters are not blocked. However, they will be useful in modes such as Cargo Run, where after winning the round, the character we won with gets a block. Having a copy of this character in the set, we can choose him again.

Not everything is smooth sailing

Concord is not without its drawbacks, both technical and conceptual. I’ll start with the latter. The game lacks some amenities and elements that improve communication. The game does not have such an element as KillCam, i.e. showing our kill from the enemy’s face. There is also no MVP (Most Valuable Player) or Best Moment of the Match. After Overwatch, these elements are sorely missed.

I also found the mechanics of the energy shield strange. It turned out to be two-sided, meaning it blocks shots from both the enemy team and your own. You can’t even throw a grenade or sphere through it.

Since Concord is a hero shooter, it will be difficult for newcomers until they learn the abilities of a few favorite heroes. In such situations, it would help to call up a tooltip with the hero’s abilities at any time during the match. However, this can only be called up in the character selection menu and in the first seconds of the battle after selecting a hero

Perhaps the blocking of the tooltip window is a technical bug, which is also common here. At some point, my character did not want to run, no matter how often I pressed L3. Sometimes the exit button disappeared from the match results window, so I had to wait until the game automatically returned to the main menu.

Battles are played 5v5, although sometimes it happened that the match did not start with an equal number of players. Most likely, this is a technical problem rather than a lack of players. Matches were found relatively quickly, I rarely waited longer than 30-40 seconds in the TDM queue.

On a PC, the situation is more interesting. In my case, the CPU (Ryzen 2700x) meets the average requirements of the game (1080p/medium), but the video card (RTX 4080S) can even pull the maximum graphics. In reality, at the recommended graphics settings for the CPU, the game delivers an average of 70-80 frames per second. That is, the actual performance is quite consistent with the stated requirements, even slightly over the top. If you raise the graphics settings, the frame rate becomes very unstable and can «walk» in the range from 40-50 to 80fps. It becomes uncomfortable to play with such fluctuations. Visually, the game looks juicy, bright, and relatively technologically advanced for an online action game. However, in general, rather modern system requirements will scare off many the audiences that owns «esports» hardware.

Graphics settings: Low / Medium / High / Ultra / PS5

Despite the generally positive impressions from the test, the biggest doubt is the game’s success in the modern video game industry. Concord is sold with a reduced price tag of 1199 UAH on both PC and PS5. Given its appearance and approach to storytelling, it is clear why developers are asking for money, as Blizzard once did with the original Overwatch. Perhaps the success of Helldivers 2 also showed that people are willing to pay money for online games.

Given that there are free-to-play analogues nearby, and they are quite successful, Concord will have a difficult path to the top, where it will have to fight with the heavyweights of the genre, the closest of which is Overwatch 2. Also, do not write off PvE-oriented games, such as the recent The First Descendant, which, despite mixed reviews, managed to attract the attention of more than 250 thousand players at its peak.

Anyone can make sure of the quality and fanaticism of Concord during the upcoming open beta, which will take place from July 18 to 21.