Firewalk Studios has shared the launch roadmap for Concord, and told us a little more about what that rotating crew system is about.
As revealed in PlayStation Blog, Season 1 starts this October, and named The Tempest. As Firewalk had promised, there will be no Battle Pass, and no paid expansions. The Tempest will introduce a new playable Freegunner, a new map, more Freegunner variants, more cosmetics, more rewards, and of course, more of those small vignettes which we assume cost Sony a pretty penny to prepare years in advance.
Season 1 will also be the launch of Concord‘s in-game store, and Firewalk again emphasizes that all these paid customization items will be cosmetic, and have no effect on gameplay.
Season 2 will start in January 2025, and they promise to have content laid out in advance for the duration of an entire year.
Now, when players first got to play the Concord beta, they were a little confused with the Crew Builder system. Why were players not just allowed to learn to play only one character, and focus on mastering them? What is the deal with having variants, and a limited number of Freegunners to choose from?
It turns out, Firewalk was thinking of emulating deck builders. By forcing a particular set of requirements on players, Firewalk hopes that players sink themselves into learning the ins and outs of the game’s mechanics and get the most fun out of figuring it out.
As you may already know, the Crew Builder allows you to pick 12 crew members for a full Custom Crew. You will need to put in a minimum of five unique Freegunners for a Custom Crew, but you are allowed to put in three Variants for a single Freegunner.
Custom Crews also have four Back Up slots, which will get randomly populated Freegunners, and the game will choose Freegunners you usually don’t use.
Freegunners also don’t have conventional hero shooter roles, like tank or DPS. All the Freegunners have high DPS and are good at gunfights. Instead, their roles are based on particular abilities, such as having long sightlines, or flanking enemies.
If your Custom Crew has balanced out roles among its Freegunners, you are rewarded with special bonuses. The whole Crew Builder system is designed to encourage experimentation and mastery.
And it certainly looks like this was the elevator pitch that Sony and Firewalk Studios should have given to us for Concord, when they first revealed it last May 2023.
There’s so much that could be said about all the avoidable mistakes that Sony did when it came to marketing and revealing this game, but at this point, it seems the die has been cast and there’s no turning back for everyone involved.
Concord will be releasing on August 23, 2024, on the PlayStation 5 and PC via Steam.
