The sole music credit on Firewalk Studios’s Concord belongs to Daniel Pemberton. Pemberton has credits that include the Spider-Verse films, Black Mirror, Slow Horses, and -- well, just look for yourself. The man is prolific. This is my favourite piece of music that Pemberton composed for Concord.

Teo, Lennox, Haymar, and The Captain of the Northstar stand gathered around the Galactic Guide map table, discussing its origins and the meaning it holds to all Freegunner crews. Image credit: Gamespot.

The song I linked above was the backing track to Concord’s playable Galactic Guide feature, which was, in thirds: a lore codex, playable star chart, and puzzle box. It reveals the complex galaxy that Firewalk’s narrative team mapped out; planets, anomalies, space stations, and the spacelanes and shortcuts the Freegunner crews would risk their ships and lives if it meant avoiding The Guild and their monopolistic grip over a new frontier they were all forced to venture forth into -- since everything and everyone they knew had been swallowed by a storm that was slowly eating entire galaxies. In this new frontier, The Wilds, crews of Freegunners (basically space pirates) and The Guild (imagine if Jeff Bezos owned Amazon, Whole Foods, every branch of the US military, The US Postal Service, and every local police force) battle it out over resources and access to free movement across the galaxy. Travel in this fiction is achieved via starships equipped with Superlight drives, all powered by Salt Fuel, and this resource is one The Guild seeks to maintain total control over the means and ends of. Ships jumping at Superlight speeds will have microscopic holes shot through them if they encounter even the smallest spec of space debris; The Guild invests heavily into maintaining clean and heavily patrolled spacelanes to connect all parts of its vast resource empire. To avoid mandatory cargo scans and militarized checkpoints, Freegunners risk their scores and ships taking dicier shortcuts between planets and Guild-controlled spacelanes. Freegunner crews respect a truce in the stars wherein they cannot fire upon each other's starships, but once aground on a planet’s surface, the safety comes off and crews readily engage in violence against one another if they’re angling for the same score.

There’s a pivotal character driving a lot of the resource-based conflict in the game’s margins. The Salt Lord. That is indeed his name, “Salt Lord.” That name is tough as shit and goes hard as hell. He has a salt palace where he cavalierly displays volatile crystals that could explode if you so much as sneeze in their direction. It’s a playable location in the actual multiplayer matchups.

Star Child rushes the rear flank of an unsuspecting 1-0ff and Haymar in the Salt Palace map. Yes, the Salt Palace belongs to the Salt Lord. Image credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment / Firewalk Studios.

In the 3 weeks it was available, I loved unlocking and reading the lore that was continuously added. Watching the weekly vignette would unlock heaps of it. Playing the game would take you across its 12 maps, and each of these seemed to unlock planet-specific lore. (Each week appeared to bring hidden lore entries you had to find with clues and then “ping” to reveal.) Find these planets (places like Glanse or Gloom) on the Galactic Guide to learn more about why a playable map on one of these planets might be called Spineworks. (“Oh, they needed to extract and carefully process the spinal fluid from gargantuan eels to make ‘Spine Wine’?” Alright, you’ve got me hooked.)

Playing as the 16 characters of the Northstar’s crew also seemed to unlock more lore about them as you spent time leveling each of them up. As someone who listened to the entire Codex in the first Mass Effect, I absolutely loved luxuriating in Concord’s unfurling narrative week after week, match after match. As someone who’s been playing Destiny for a decade, I’d confidently say that Concord was laying out a network of causes, characters, histories, and palpable places that was easily as high of a quality as its contemporaries.

Destiny needs to be brought up here, since some (Many? All? I was too lazy to cross-reference everything.) of the Firewalk founding staff comes from Bungie. This is obvious if you play the game. The general gamefeel and 3Cs (Camera, Character, Control) feel much like Destiny. Again, speaking from my bias here; this means the FPS gamefeel is absolutely best-in-class. When I started playing Destiny in 2015, I wasn’t yet married and certainly didn’t yet have multiple children. I spent years chasing endgame content and raiding with coworkers. I have the Obsidian Dreams emblem. In 2024, I’ve wrapped the campaign on The Final Shape and said my final goodbyes. I am now happily married and have 2 wonderful children. My days of raiding a few select nights of the week or running Grandmaster content have been over for a couple of years now. I couldn’t keep up with buildcrafting -- which had become an extensive and laborious part of Destiny 2’s Full-Time Player Experience -- and this meant I also couldn’t casually pursue sessions in PVP modes like Trials of Osiris. This was hard to accept -- I love the worlds, characters, and every single mode of play in Destiny.

Promotional render still from the reveal of Destiny 2’s “The Final Shape” expansion. Cayde-6 has somehow come back to life, much to the amazement of Ikora. Both stand together in the Pale Heart of The Traveler, now that the Vanguard have finally pierced the Veil in their pursuit of The Witness. Image credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment / Bungie.

To cut directly to it, Concord arrived to fill a void until recently filled by Destiny. I could play PVP and not have to buildcraft or chase new gear to stay competitive or even functional. I could experience a story that had pages and margin notes added every week. I could savour rich, expertly-executed environment, ship, and character art that seemed inspired by some of my favourites; Gael Bertrand, Moebius, Frank Frazetta, Ashley Wood, Noriyoshi Ohrai, Chris Foss, and more. (I’d love to see reference and inspiration boards from the art teams at Firewalk!) When people compare the characters to that of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, I understand but still can’t help but shake my head at that. If that’s all your cultural well contains, I reserve the right to feel bad for you and your imagination.

I’ve seen lots of chatter from players and press that compare Concord to Overwatch but, other than having a wide roster of playable characters that occupy distinct roles and classes, I think the similarities really end there. It’s closer to Destiny in its core gamefeel and gameplay modes. Still, it’s unlike Destiny or Overwatch in that Concord doesn’t have charged Supers or Ultimates (respectively) that have the capacity to turn the tides in bombastic fashion. It also lacks a Payload / Escort mode like Overwatch. And, to further dampen the Overwatch comparisons, healing cannot make or break a fight in Concord -- but it certainly helps. (And every character is designed to primarily deal damage even if their kit includes some healing abilities.) Snowballing and teamshooting works very well in Concord, just like it does in Destiny and Overwatch, however. I think there's a fairly obvious reason, design-wise, that Concord forgoes having its equivalent of a Super or Ult, which I’ll touch upon later.

The main aspects of Destiny’s gamefeel that will feel familiar are Concord’s handling and shooting of weapons; jumping in various forms of hovers, gliding, and double- and triple-jumps; dodging that quickly cuts to third-person and then back to first-person (that comes with bonuses like stealth camo, instantaneous reloads, and more); some of the character abilities like explosive throwing knifes, tripwire grenades, and powered melee attacks that send your character lunging forward like a rocket-propelled freight train. All of this building on Halo’s earlier foundations. There’s some characters in Concord that Halo fans will love specifically because of their primary weapons and ability kits, namely a snappy 3-round-burst battle rifle, a bolt-action sniper rifle, stealth camouflage, a defensive bubble shield, and some plinky-plonky grenades.

Vale's Sniper Rifle wasn't a one-hit-kill but it made eliminations with it extra sweet and hard-won. Better players could confidently charge into firefights outgunned and still come on top. Manually reloading after landing a shot would trigger Vale's passive of faster reloading, and this could stack up to 3 times -- and combine with a Crew Bonus that increased base reload speeds!

So, the reason that Concord forgoes Supers, I think, centers on the Crew Bonus system. Each of the 16 characters slot into 1 of 6 Class specifications. Each Class provides a Crew Bonus, which is a per-session permanent buff that will be applied after you respawn. The revolver-toting, exploding knife-throwing Lennox is classified as a Warden. The Warden Crew Bonus is longer weapon range. Play as Lennox (or any other Warden character) once and you’ve got this applied for any other character you choose afterwards. I’m sure a shared Super energy pool, across characters could’ve been smartly designed, but I found the focus on pure gunplay, positioning, and team shooting to be streamlined and thrilling. (The same way I found XDefiant’s rejection of Killstreaks to keep players engaged and actively seeking out fire fights instead of camping to protect their streak.) This focus doesn’t mean Concord was a straightforward game. Concord’s four Respawn-enabled game modes allow for pretty casual play where you don’t have to think too hard about the order or amount of Crew Bonuses you acquire. The Respawn-prohibited modes (of which there are two) is where an entirely separate metastrategy layer lives.

Before diving into the deeper strategic level of Respawn-prohibited play in Concord, I want to briefly take a detour into the Respawn-enabled modes to highlight some small ruleset changes Concord made to standard game modes that instilled an implicit balancing and a strong “just one more match” feel to the lighter fare here. Concord has 2 Respawn-enabled playlists; Brawl and Overrun. Brawl contains the modes Takedown (TDM) and Trophy Hunt, the latter of which is akin to Call of Duty’s Kill Confirmed or Destiny’s Supremacy. The classics, unbroken and unbothered. Overrun contains the modes Area Control, akin to COD’s Domination or Destiny’s Control, and Signal Chase, which plays like Call of Duty’s Hardpoint. While Signal Chase is a standard Hardpoint or King of the Hill mode, where pre-empting and pre-capturing a newly revealed zone is the surefire path to victory, Concord’s version of Domination features a smart tweak that I’m hoping more MP FPS games shamelessly steal. In Area Control, your team must control 2 zones and they must be uncontested to begin accruing points. Skill-Based Match Making is something I frankly can’t be bothered to dive deep into in such a flyby blog post, but matchups in Concord were either over fast -- in the case of clearly mismatched team skill compositions -- or battled to the very end of dramatic, nail-bitingly close scorelines. This was most evident in great games of Area Control, where teams would be fighting like hell over 1 zone to resume scoring -- or sending rogue players off to the further-but-unprotected zone in an attempt to catch the other team unawares and divert pressure from the central zone for an easier recapture. This made for a more active scoring style when compared to versions of this game mode in other games like Destiny or Call of Duty, where just owning more zones than the other team (but not having them be uncontested) affords your team points. So simple but so thrilling. Ok, let’s go deep on the metalayer I was speaking about earlier, the Crew Builder system, which really seeks to leverage the aforementioned Crew Bonus buffs.

A gameplay snippet showcasing the playable character Teo, whom Halo or Call of Duty fans would no doubt make fast friends with his primary weapon and ability kit. In the lower right of the HUD, you can see glyphs for all 6 active Crew Bonus buffs: Faster Reload Speed, Improved Mobility, Improved Weapon Recoil, Faster Dodge Cooldown, Increased Healing Received, and Longer Weapon Range.

The Crew Builder system is what underpins most of the No Respawn modes. These modes are played in “first-to-four-wins” sets of 7 matches. You build “decks” of characters with certain stipulations: 12 characters in a deck (you’ll get 4 backups chosen at random in every match to resolve potential conflicts with your teammates), you must have at least 5 unique characters and no more than 3 of the same character’s Variant. Variants are another huge factor that I’ll try to explain as expediently as possible; Variants have a unique perk that slightly changes the way an existing character plays and 2 of these were doled out as account-level progression unlocks at launch and then, every week after that, 1 weekly Variant would be unlocked after a set of 5 tailored challenges were completed. So, you use the Crew Builder to make decks that could change every week, provided that you unlocked and enjoyed playing the new Variant enough to rebuild a Crew to include them. And when you play the No Respawn modes, the order in which you choose characters (acknowledging that there can only be 1 version of a specific character picked per team at once) affects your Crew Bonus stack, which meant that more competitive players started theorycrafting pick orders that brought “build orders” and “tech trees” from Strategy games to mind. Concord, therefore, asks players not to main 1 particular character but to have many mains -- plural. There’s a lot of depth and headroom for mechanical expression in each character but, for the new player, the kits prove narrow enough that it’s easy enough to play a few characters and do well enough. And, like in fighting games, once you start to consider yourself skilled, you can purposely choose certain characters that have great counterplay opportunities as meaningful counterpicks.

Do I think Concord could do away with Crew Bonuses to make the game more approachable? Sure. Would I want this, myself? Not really, especially since I think that would come at the expense of the core design underpinnings of the more competitive No Respawn modes. The longer I played, the more I felt confident in my skills as certain characters -- so much so that I didn’t feel the need for X or Y Crew Bonus. Especially in the Respawn-enabled modes where the stakes were much lower. Perhaps Firewalk could’ve tried additional playlists where they could experiment with having all Crew Bonuses on by default or something of the sort.

The game also launched with a Training mode where you could test each Freegunner out to learn the intricacies of their abilities and kit -- or even to learn and feel the effects of the Crew Bonus buffs. There was also a per-Freegunner, solo Time Trails mode that evokes fond memories of Titanfall 2’s Pilot Gauntlet, complete with leaderboards through which I saw many players engage in some friendly-but-fierce rivalries.

A shot of the Crew Builder rule sheet, which also displays descriptions for Crew Bonuses. Image credit: The Gamer / Sanyam Jain

During the beta (or someone’s first several hours with the retail release) the Crew Bonus system was one of the harder points to initially grok -- and much beta feedback alluded to this -- but it seemed like the team at Firewalk did heaps of UI tweaks for the final release that made comprehending the system much easier. Worth noting is that the beta didn’t have Join-In-Progress and Leaver / Quitter penalties but Firewalk addressed both of these in a few weeks before the game launched. (Join-In-Progress was probably an interesting design problem to solve. Do you give the late-joiner some randomized, pre-applied Crew Bonuses? Do you have to synchronize and then lockout shared character picks that are already actively being played by other players on the late-joiners team?) I’m not sure if the beta was a really old build and the team had already pre-empted a lot of these concerns amidst their own playtesting before the betas even went live but I want to commend the efforts to address feedback here, regardless.

Beyond the Crew Bonus system, a larger point of contention was Concord’s pricepoint of $40. I don’t think comparisons to Helldivers 2 really matter here -- it’s a game in a different genre, supported by an entirely different monetization model. Much ink was spent by the enthusiast press communicating Firewalk’s aim of supporting the game with a fixed price of entry and forgoing the use of Battle Passes as a monetization lever. I think this was really noble! As someone who’s really felt burnt by the FOMO aspect of Battle Passes -- as well as cheaters who run rampant in many Free-to-Play games -- I thought this was a unique selling point for Concord to hang its hat on. However, I think this point wasn’t communicated directly enough (or at all) to players who might only come into contact with Concord through its marketing videos and store page listings. Perhaps if more prospective players saw this in a video or social media post centering it, the asking price would’ve made more sense? I’m not sure. Overwatch, the game Concord gets compared to more often than not, costs nothing to play but your time.

There was another contingent of players who initially felt mislead (I guess?) by the initial video teaser. I guess they were a victim of their own success because the high quality of this pre-rendered video trailer lead some fans to believe they were getting more of what they were accustomed to from PlayStation’s stable of first party developers, that typically delivered amazing third-person action adventure games. It didn’t matter that the video showed a title card for Firewalk’s logo in the beginning or that the description literally said, “Introducing Concord—a new PVP multiplayer first-person shooter,” because nobody reads that bit of text. It would appear that not many folks read the accompanying PlayStation Blog post either. Weirder still, there’s a smaller minority of players who somehow think that everything is subtractive and that single player game X or multiplayer game Y was canceled at the cost of Concord’s existence rather than the possibility of many games existing at the same time in very different production budgets, team capabilities, team desires, and / or realities. And I really don’t care to get into speculation about now-retired PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan’s involvement in corporate-level strategy and where Concord may or may not have figured into all of that.

The Northstar’s bridge control panel and foreward window looks out at a Superlight-speed jump in progress.
Image credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment / Firewalk Studios.

There are many things to dissect about pre-release marketing and the lead up to Concord’s release that might’ve lead to its underwhelming sales numbers, but that’s not my forte. I will say that simultaneously launching on Steam and Epic Games Store, especially after the low interest (or awareness?) on PC shown during the beta seems to have been the biggest backfire, especially combined with the $40 USD entry fee. The Steam CCU numbers were the albatross that hung around Concord’s neck during the beta weekends and well after launch. Press misreported that the Steam numbers were the all-encompassing numbers, or at least misspoke on several late-August and early-September podcasts I listened to where they discussed Concord. Analysts put together estimates that the game only sold 25,00 units across all 3 storefronts. As someone who was playing the game, it was really frustrating that nobody in the press seemed to want to engage with the game itself. They seemed more interested into talking about CCUs, making comparisons to Overwatch (and mentions of “Hero Shooter”) that seemed so misguided that they appeared to be naked attempts at hitting Google Keywords to increase the SEO ranking of these articles.

Favourable or sympathetic media coverage came but it all felt too little, too late. Player numbers dwindled by observable metrics such as Steam CCUs. Firewalk attempted to speed up progression gains and incentivize play in the No Respawn modes by increasing the XP payout by ~300% -- win or lose -- and this led to Trophy Hunters rushing in to abuse the fact that even losing would net you 15,000 XP. This small move essentially ruined one of Concord’s best ways to play -- meaning that remaining players would more often than not be unable to play out matches since the other team would be leaping out of bounds to kill themselves to finish the match as fast as possible. I think this would’ve been fixed in the following week but then the bad news arrived -- Concord was going to be shut down, refunded, and removed from sale on Friday, 06 September. Firewalk’s Game Director Ryan Ellis has put his name on this post, which I think is a commendable thing to do, in addition to automatically filing refunds.

Lennox, Haymar, Star Child, and 1-0ff hang onto each other on a job that looks to have gone wrong.
Image credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment / Firewalk Studios.

As someone who was absolutely loving playing Concord every night (and literally losing valuable sleep doing it), this news was absolutely gutting. I was crushed. Not only as a player, but as a fellow developer. Concord seemed like a dream to play and I hope it was a dream project to have worked on together for the crew at Firewalk. To me, it was the video game equivalent of Jodorowsky’s Dune, in that it was a dream concept and backing creative team, but Concord had the one thing Jorodowsky was missing -- the execution; Concord actually was made manifest. But it’s all come undone now. I hope the team at Firewalk gets to stay together and retool the game somehow. To have the entire thing pulled out from underneath us players feels strangely cruel. The Northstar and her crew’s story was just starting -- and just starting to get good. (A clash with the crew of the Dark Cutter on Glance loomed.) Daniel Pemberton’s OST hinted at what was to come, with 2 tracks dedicated to The Tempest that we’d not heard in-game yet. The Secret Level episode dedicated to Concord is still likely, maybe, hopefully coming.

Before it was pulled, Concord was scheduled to include more free-to-earn content and a paid cosmetic shop in October, coinciding with the launch of Season 1. Perhaps this means that a future exists for Concord where it’s F2P instead of a fixed price of entry. If adding Battle Passes and more aggressive microtransactions means it can be played by more people, I’d say go for it — I’d be willing to bet a lot of people will like what they play if they can make it as far as installing and playing their first few matches without spending a single cent.

When the final hours of Concord’s server uptime drew near, many of us in the wonderfully moderated and constructed official Discord server said our temporary goodbyes and posted our final stats and Business Cards. Several of us have broken off into our own private Discord to stay together, and strategize on what’s next. All of us are talking about how to fill our time now that we can’t play Concord together; some are moving onto new releases, others of us are scrambling to preserve everything we captured while playing, and some are attempting to datamine the game.

1-0ff, the chipper and tidy Sparked Disposal Robot gives a thumbs up.
Image credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment / Firewalk Studios.

In its Front End Menu, Concord has a section titled “How To Play” and within that is a blurb about what Concord’s namesake refers to. Firewalk directly cites a dictionary definition of the word, “[an] agreement or harmony between people or groups.” To me, for a brief moment in time, the game was a shared space with several kind, funny, and competitive players. Today, a small set of us are still bonding together over our shared interests. And even though we can’t play the game together anymore, we’re still talking about it, still theorizing about its lore, still combing through datamined files and assets. Someone might ask us why it all matters, but what matters is we’re still together, bound by hope.