With just a week and change left until Concord hits the ground running, the team behind the first-person hero shooter has announced its plans for the PlayStation 5 console exclusive’s future. A roadmap confirms at least three seasons of post-launch updates, as well as a microtransaction store coming in October.
“The base game is a foundation for us to build upon over time, through systems that will expand the universe, introduce new ways to play and master each character, give you hundreds of unique rewards to earn and unlock, and narratives to unfold week after week, alongside seasonal updates that will introduce new characters, new maps and worlds, new modes, new stories, new features, and more,” game director Ryan Gillis wrote on the PlayStation Blog on Tuesday.
Season 1 kicks off in October and will add a new playable character, map, Freegunner variants, quality of life updates, new rewards, additional cinematic vignettes, and most importantly an in-game item shop. That’s where players will be able to spend additional money over the $40 boxed price to “supplement the hundreds of rewards earnable through progression.” Gillis stresses that none of these items will impact gameplay, though it remains to be seen how much cooler the stuff in the store looks than what you can unlock just by playing.
Season 2 will go live at the start of 2025 in January. That’s when Concord will get its 18th playable character, another new map, a new game mode, and other updates, rewards, and story cinematics. Season 3 will follow in April, but the studio’s not revealing what’s planned for it just yet. And of course, even in-between seasons, the game will continue getting its mini-story drops at the start of each new week. There’s no battle pass and all the seasonal content is free.
It’s an ambitious slate of content for a live-service shooter very few people believe in right now. The beta, while showcasing solid gunplay and matches that were fun enough, didn’t feel like it had the spark necessary to breakthrough in a competitive landscape dominated by massively popular existing free-to-play games like Valorant, Apex Legends, and Fortnite. It sounds like no matter what happens, Sony and Firewalk Studios are committed to delivering on Concord’s first year.
After that, as we’ve seen with other games, including 2024’s Suicide Squad, Concord’s future will probably be less certain. If it can find a foothold in the current PC and console gaming landscape, though, it will probably be as a result of its Crew Builder mechanic. There’s a whole layer of Concord that lets players customize the crews they take into matches with variants of characters that have unique stats, including buffs that get applied to the rest of the team once that character has been used in a particular match for the first time.
It’s an interesting idea that didn’t really surface in the beta but could set Concord apart. We’ll know once the full game comes out on August 20 for deluxe edition owners and August 23 for everyone else.