Concord is one of the biggest flops of all time and everybody has an answer for why. Marvel Rivals‘ director Thaddeus Sasser is just the latest, with his suggestion that Sony’s short-lived hero shooter didn’t offer any “unique value” to its would-be audience. At least, not enough unique value to push players to abandon the multiplayer games they were already committed to.
There’s definitely some truth to that. The game indisputably did not succeed, and if it had been able to pull people away from their multiplayer games, it would have. But I disagree that Concord didn’t have any unique value. Its pitch is one of the first to excite me — someone who doesn’t play multiplayer games all that often — in years.
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Concord Failed, But It Had A Compelling Pitch
In fact, the last time I remember being as enticed by the pitch for a multiplayer game was PUBG back in 2017. Hearing podcasters describe the 1-vs-99 mechanics that drove the battle royale had me champing at the bit to try the game despite not having a gaming PC. I even bought Fortnite — yes, this was back when it was possible to buy Fortnite — because I was so eager to try a battle royale.
Concord’s pitch may not have resonated with a wide audience like battle royales did back then. But I still think that Firewalk Studios was onto something.
Concord was a hero shooter (like Overwatch) with a sci-fi world and oddball characters (like Guardians of the Galaxy) so it’s fair to say originality wasn’t its strong suit. But during that lengthy preview we got of the game earlier this year, Firewalk pitched the game as doing what Overwatch hadn’t. Instead of relegating its narrative to extracurricular shorts or comic books, Concord was actually going to put the story into the game with weekly narrative vignettes.
I Want More Single-Player In My Multiplayer
That’s still a great idea, even if Concord didn’t live long enough to make good on its promise. When Fortnite arrived on the scene, and began doing interesting things with its ongoing story, I started to wonder what the next frontiers for this kind of storytelling could be. Concord seemed like a potential answer, blending the authored stories of single-player games with the emergent stories of multiplayer, and doing so more elegantly than Anthem, where characters chattered in your ear during missions when you wanted to be talking to your friends.
The problem is, though, that doing this at the level Concord was planning to is very expensive. Apex Legends did something similar for a while, but has largely shifted away from it. It’s easy to understand why. Rolling out new cutscenes every week means grabbing a ton of voice work and motion capture, which means either continually paying actors for the duration of the game’s run or just grabbing hours of scenes before the game even goes live. The problem with the second option is that it prevents the game from being nimble. New vignettes can’t play off audience reactions if they’re all created in advance, before the audience can even get its hands on it.
So, there are some obstacles for this particular model. But games could take the idea and experiment with it in less expensive ways. Scenes could have text dialogue, but no voice acting. You could incorporate voice acting over a static piece of concept art, rather than fully animating a cutscene. It could just be entirely text-based, with weekly short stories about the characters being accessible in the game. Or it could be some combination of all those things.
The idea is good, and would be a good way to get single-player fans like me to actually stick with multiplayer games. I’m driven by stories and characters, and there’s no reason multiplayer should give up on increased inclusion of those elements just because Concord failed.
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