Thoughts on Concord

I know I haven’t been here in a hot minute, but I’m changing that (he says again having not been able to keep that promise last time, but I’ve got ideas this time??? I don’t know, doesn’t matter), but I had some thoughts after I was handed a bag of garbage for a White Elephant. I say garbage, it was kind of funny, could be useful to some people, but the guy who brought it said it was literally just sitting in his closet for the last year at minimum. And no, it wasn’t a shitty move, we have an unspoken agreement in the group that we bring one “good” gift and one “bad” gift, and then we play left right center. Neither of my gifts were good or bad, but of an ambiguous quality this year, though the included framed picture of me was more warmly regarded than I expected.

I think I’m off topic, in the bottom of the bag of crap was a copy of Concord. For anyone who doesn’t know, Concord was a very short-lived 5v5, hero shooter. Think of Overwatch or Valorant, but it kind of had Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy vibes going for it. I didn’t play it in it’s short run - not only did I not have a PS5, but it just kind of slipped my notice for whatever reason - and I can’t speak to how it played, nor can I really do the story of the rise and fall of it justice. If you want to know the whole story, I suggest reading this post from Reddit, it goes in depth in a way I can’t. One thing that did pique my interest was the trailer. Too long, didn’t watch: sounds like a you problem, but it shows a crew of… I would say heroes, but lets call them characters, regrouping after a heist and planning their next steps when they’re jumped by another crew of would-be thieves. There’s a scuffle and a chase and the whole thing does give an attempt at Guardians of the Galaxy humor. It showcases powers, which is interesting in itself - the big red guy’s skin turns to diamond and he works like a shield, while the robot has a vacuum gun? Needless to say the concept looks cool, the universe seems interesting, and there’s so much potential for story there.

Another glimpse at building this universe came in December 2024 - three months after the game was killed and the studio folded in on itself - with the Amazon Prime series Secret Level. Episode 13 Tale of the Implacable is based in the Concord universe, and follows a separate crew from the trailer on their own heist to first rescue their captain, and then to get away with something stolen from the galactic governing body. It does more in eighteen minutes to get me excited about Concord than any other marketing I’d seen (which was admittedly little) and I honestly said to myself, “damn, I would have liked to play this.”

Thinking about it though, I don’t think I would have liked to play it in it’s incarnation. The hero-shooter model was never really my jam. I played Overwatch, I found it fun, but I enjoyed the characters and their stories more than the gameplay. And that could just be a me thing, I’ve always been story driven, which is why I never chased the meta, would play whatever character I felt like, and would honestly look more forward to the character trailers and tie-in comics that filtered from the Blizzard team.

But we’re talking about Concord. Obviously I’m not in the gaming industry (though not for lack of trying), but I feel like it would have been a better model for Concord to have gone the way of Payday. Follow a string of characters into heists spanning across the galaxy. Have bites of story between, more you could pick up in missions through audiologs or data files, make different characters available as the story goes on (with the ability to go back and replay missions with any unlocked character after you’ve beaten it), and maybe more story/character unlocks for completing missions on higher difficulties. You would be able to keep the abilities for different characters, give each of them a default loadout and then maybe you could switch weapons out as you purchase them or find them during missions. Space Payday. I’d play that.

Anyway, that’s my two cents. Maybe I could have save Firewalk Studios from an Icarus level freefall, but maybe that would have flopped just as hard. The world will never know.

That said, I might start writing a game…