Overwatchy FPS Concord gets new trailer and August PC release date with a beta in July
Freegunner keep an eye on it?
Sony have dropped a trailer and release date for Concord at their latest State Of Play, Concord being a new 5V5 multiplayer FPS in which you play a bunch of freegans carrying out heists on various loudly coloured alien planets. Sorry, not freegans - freegunners. Freeganism is a portmanteau of "free" and "vegan" referring to people who fish jars of near-spoiled hummus out of supermarket dumpsters according to an ideology of minimal resource consumption. Freegunners, meanwhile, are lairy Guardians Of The Galaxy-alike mercenaries with phat guns and playstyle-defining secondary abilities. They do not consume hummus as far as I know. The game is out 23rd August 2024, with a beta happening in July, and I've got an overview trailer for you below.
Concord was announced a year ago, and is the work of Washington-based Firewalk. They were originally part of ProbablyMonsters, and were already working on Concord before Sony acquired them fully. The game is very much trying to be one of those sociable moshpit affairs where a brace of different tactics and readily role-playable hero characterisations give rise to a rich spread of watercooler anecdotes. Even as I type these words, I realise that I have never offered or heard a watercooler anecdote. No watercoolers out here in darkest Watford. Our anecdotes are all whispered between the aisles of Budgens, with one eye peeled for CCTV cameras, or scrawled on leaves and tossed into the ditches beside the M1.
You will, of course, need a PlayStation Network account to play, as you will if you're playing the just-announced Steam version of God Of War Ragnarök on PC. Here's our former EIC Katharine's (RPS in peace) announcement post about Concord and various other new shooters at last May's State Of Play showcase. She was none too pleased with it, noting the overabundance of "bland new multiplayer shooters" and commenting:
I was all ready to love this sci-fi whateveritis with its weird space burgers, detailed ship innards and enigmatic blinking lights. But oh no. The PlayStation Blog post for it revealed the sad truth. It tells us it's "a bringing together of peoples", that each log on will bring you "a new adventure" and every match "is an opportunity for a new story".
Gosh, that Katharine certainly was a live one.
Preorders for Concord start on 6th June, unlocking beta access for you and four friends in July. There are 16 characters in total, encompassing a familiar spread of tanks and DPS and support. You've got chonky sentinels who can deploy force barricades, mystics who can glide and cast fire walls, and diving assault-types who can use infra to shoot through their own smokescreens. I'm not seeing anything as funky as a Tracer Blink combo or a rolling robo-hamsterball, but it looks like there's some variety, and the visuals and animations are snappy. We can expect weekly cinematic vignettes to introduce each character. Speaking of which, here's a story trailer to close us out.
