Concord Will Fade Because It's Too Generic

Summary

There have been so many games like Concord, it's hard to see it lasting
This genre still dominates, but only through older legacy games
Sony needs to change tactics away from this cash chasing strategy

I didn't really know what to make of Concord when it opened 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sony's recent State of Play and set the tone for Team Blue finishing dead last out of the three big guns' summer spectacles. Everyone seemed to think 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Concord🐬 looked great until it showed off gameplay, but I found myself going '...meh' 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:even at the CG portion of the reveal. Now that we've seen some gameplay, I'm still left asking what the point of this game is.

It's a question that crosses my mind more and more these days. Gaming has always been a business - that's why sequels have been commonplace since the beginning. You make a thing people love, you give 'em more of it, and they give you more and more money each time. But it used to feel like this started with an idea. Someone, or some team, came up with a story concept or character they loved, the world loved them back, so they made more and more of them.

Concord's Gameplay Looks Like Every Other Game

two characters aiming shotguns at each other in Concord

Concord never seemed like that to me, even before any meagre enthusiasm the world felt for it was deflated by the reveal it was a 5v5 hero shooter. It seemed like an idea born of pie charts andꦡ focus group notes scrawled on a whiteboard. It made the same beige impression as Hyenas, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Knockout City, CrossfireX, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hyper Scape, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Foamstars, and t𒊎hat list really could be twice as longꩵ and still be nowhere close to exhaustive.

This doesn't feel like a game that has been made because any individual or team has passion for it, but because executives mandated creating a game that could steadily generate income to supplement the periodic revenue streams provided by tentpole releases from flagship studios, and no sentence so boring could ever lead to an entertaining game.

Seeing the Concord gameplay, it's fine. I can understand people playing it, or even watching, Concord and thinking it looks good. But it doesn't just need to be good. It needs to be the best thing in the world's most oversaturated genre and win over fans who are loyal to their established games and have been for years, all while gaining momentum fast. The guns feeling pretty cool just doesn't cut it. What's unique here? Why should anyone care?

Now that longer slices of gameplay have been revealed, people have been comparing it to Halo. Halo is one of the most popular and iconic names in the shooter space and it failed in this genre. Infinite is still going, which is something of a success compared to the other games I listed, but it failed in its quest to become an industry leader in the live-service space. Everyone making games in this genre right now is chasing a pot of gold that has already been slurped dry. I know Fortnite and Apex are still making money off it, but it's too late. They drank your milkshake.

It's Too Late For A Game Like Concord

Even going back to the original selling point of the entertaining characters, have any of them stuck in your head even a little bit? There was a guy who wanted sriracha, right? It drew instant comparisons to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Guardians of the Galaxy, and while having a point of ꦕreference can be helpful, being so obvio🔯usly aping another successful franchise is rarely the path to success or innovation.

Developer Firewatch also says Concord's narrative will move forward each week with a new cinematic, aiming to find a unique path into the field through storytelling. But I'm not sure how successful this will be - in a PvP game, maintaining the validity of that narrative is going to be difficult, and it seems extremely overambitious to have them be cinematics each time.

They could be stacked up for months in advance, but then you aren't engaging in active storytelling with your audience, which is surely what you want.

I just don't believe they'll keep up with that self-inflicted demand and I don't think the demand will be there. Getting updates out slower than intended is the number one struggle this plethora of live service games have, and adding extra workload on top of that for pretty limited gain considering the target audience feels like a recipe for disaster. You can't be a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation game and say 'our unique thing is that we tell a story'. PlayStation already does that, and they probably do it better than you because they get eight years to tell their story and all the money in the world, without the distractions of seasonal updates, meta rebalance, server issues, and battle pass progression counterweighted with the need to milk whales.

It's also not even unique any more. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Helldivers 2 already found a way to make storytelling feel like it belongs in the live-service genre, and Concord now has that to live up to, as well as Halo, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the dozens of other games it has been compared to. Concord is a mix of other ideas that have worked before and the aim of the game is not that people like it enough that it sells a lot of copies, but that it can pick players' pockets for months and years to constantly make money. Players see through that, and after a month or so in the wild, I suspect they'll see through Concord too.