Could Concord’s one major drawback be that it wasn’t free? Possibly, but there are other areas that could use strengthening as well.
Reading our review you can say that Concord’s strength is its gameplay. Swift action packed driven games that flow, with mechanics that are top tier in the industry. The game’s major weakness is poor character design and a lack of imagination when you start to unravel the layers. So what exactly should Concord devs look to improve now that this basically “early access” experiment is over?
Add A Story….
One of the most significant problems with Concord is that its intriguing lore is buried within extensive walls of text in the Galactic Guide. This can be frustrating for players who want to immerse themselves in the game’s story without having to spend hours reading through dense paragraphs. While some characters may have a few quick paragraphs of lore, others have pages worth of text that can be tedious to scroll through, let alone read in their entirety.
Without actually reading these blurbs, you’ll miss out on the character connections. Why are some characters grumpy, while others are cheerful? What’s the context for their sarcastic remarks? We get told Lennox can stop for a snack, but it’s unclear why, and it doesn’t seem to matter. Writers often need editors to identify inconsistencies because writers tend to retain details in their minds, forgetting that others aren’t writing alongside them. That’s what appears to have occurred here. It resembles a collection of “inside jokes” for which no one is aware of the context.
Concord started off with an excellent CG story trailer when they first showcased the game, and then after that it dwindled down to basically nothing. The worst part, the small tidbits of video we get with each weekly update are not archived in the game. Each week a new cutscene is introduced at the beginning of the game, but if you miss the old one there doesn’t seem to be a library to watch the previous week (or any previous) scenes. After doing a little discovery myself I learned there is a Youtube channel that is posting the videos, but I highly doubt many people are going to go to that extent.
However, releasing a weekly video for a game that needs a connection with characters also seems like a bad idea. We had no idea who these characters were. Even Overwatch booted the game with a general “this is Overwatch,” cinematic, which is something Concord desperately needed. What is a freegunner? Who is Lennox? Why do I want to be best friends with 1-OFF?
Arguably Sony could have flexed their media company as a whole to create outside sources of media for the game, but they didn’t (yet). So we are left with discovering the characters via the game, and if you’re not open to reading a novel between matches, then good luck.
Ultimate’s
When playing Concord, I mentioned that there is one major gameplay mechanic missing. No character possessed a unique ability that set them apart from the others. All characters were primarily offense-based, with shooting as the main focus. However, in lopsided matches, there was no feature or ability available to shift the balance. Once a match became one-sided, there was no way to turn the tide, and the outcome was predetermined until the end.
Adding in ults would add some separation between characters, and somewhat encourage players to pick a bigger variety of characters when playing. Right now it seems people either drift towards fast paced characters, or self healing characters, and the longer Concord was live, the more the team aspect deviated entirely.
It is kind of odd to have a team-hero shooter and not have any sort of ultimate, or even some type of team based boost for players. There was no real need to build towards anything within the match, and no openly strategic motives beyond simply sticking together.
More Game Modes and Longer Games
The content roadmap for the game does not explicitly mention additional game modes, as far as I’m aware. However, the game would greatly benefit from more team-based modes, such as “move the payload” or similar, to add variety and prevent players from defaulting to team deathmatch every time they play.
But my biggest gripe with Concord has to be the length of games. I honestly felt like I was between matches more than I was actually in a game. And that isn’t saying that it wasn’t finding games, my wait times were under a minute, but you were either winning quickly, or losing quickly. There were no momentum swings or real dog fights. Which, like I mentioned earlier, is possibly a good thing with how lopsided matches were. However if a comeback was started, the game often ended before it could be completed. Ultimately it felt like each match was just one round of a full game. That is unless you were playing the no respawn mode, Rivalry, which seemed like it was one round too long.
More XP for winning
You simply need more ways to earn legitimate XP. When playing the game for fun I had no real reason to care. I was leveling up fine, but once that end date was announced I realized how little XP I got from doing basic tasks. Each match awards you for a decent amount of XP for simply finishing the match. Playing the no respawn mode, Rivalry, got you 3x the amount of XP, but outside of that there was no real way to “farm” XP from anything.
Going on kill streaks, capturing objectives, leveling up characters, and other in-game objectives all rewarded little XP by comparison. For example, getting an elimination was only 25xp. You could obliterate the other team and get dozens of eliminations, and you still wouldn’t make enough XP to put a dent in your leveling.
This is why you’ve probably been reading how people were jumping off maps to quickly level up before the games end date, because there was no incentive to actually win matches. You get an extra 500xp from winning, while you get 15k for simply finishing the game. That’s nothing. You need 100k xp to level up, so of course people were going to take the easy route to gaining XP. However with over 77 hours put into the game I still couldn’t make it to the level 100 cap. I had 3k elimination, similar assists, and hundreds of games played, but the only real way to reach the cap seemed to be suffering the Rivalry mode for over 100 hours….
I’m not even sure what the “lore XP” was for either, it was separated from normal XP and rewarded nothing.
Cut the overall grinding
As Concord’s layers are progressively unlocked, a recurring issue becomes more apparent. The unlockable options and missions are underwhelming. For instance, completing 32 matches grants a mere 2.5k XP, which is unsatisfying to say the least. Throughout my gameplay, Concord seemed to recycle the same tasks repeatedly, devoid of any substantial rewards for completion. This becomes a slow repetitive grind, particularly when reaching “tier 15” of the missions and encountering the same five tasks as before.
The unlockables were equally disappointing. Players had to invest countless hours with a single character to level up and unlock… a new glove color? There were no imaginative designs or exclusive gear to be obtained. It seemed as if the developers expected players to grind through basic content for a month, while they had us hoping for something exciting in a future season. As mentioned in my review, the team promised weekly content updates, so it’s unclear whether the creative elements were withheld to prolong their offerings or not. The initial response from the gaming community, however, can be summed up as “what the fuck is this?”
At its core, Concord has addicting gameplay with, quite honestly, the best shooter mechanics on the shelf. It only becomes a problem when stepping outside of that core gameplay, where character designs are bland, and the layers of creativity dwindle quickly. It’s also the reason why the audience for the game was so small from the get go. People simply don’t want to invest their time to unlock a new shade of red for their gloves, especially if they dont give a shit about the character it’s for. And this is Concord’s biggest issue. Creativity beyond gameplay. You can make a super fun game that has all the mechanics done right, but if it isn’t impactful outside of that… well, Concord lasted 10 whole days.
These updates, combined with better marketing by Sony, could very likely save a future released Concord. If we ever get to see it again.
