Concord Early Access Beta Receives Good 1st Impressions, But Player Numbers Are Low

The Early Access Beta period for Firewalk Studios’ Concord has ended, and with it comes some good and bad news for the game.

Early Access was originally going to be exclusive to consumers who pre-ordered the game, but at the 11^th hour, Sony announced that all PlayStation Plus subscribers could play. Of course, this offer would only be for PlayStation 5 players.

Several YouTubers in particular shared detailed impressions of what they could play of Concord. We won’t go into too much detail on their opinions, but there’s a few things that even official press previews weren’t really able to explain.

So the big change Concord makes from other hero shooters is it limits the number of characters you can play. And then, the way the game works, after you play as one of the characters, you have to then select another character in the same pool.

This can be potentially frustrating to gamers, because other hero shooters like Overwatch have gotten them used to playing as only one character, essentially learning one playstyle and mastering it. There is kind of a way around this, as Concord allows you to build ‘variants’ of the same character. Each variant will have some different qualities, which you can modify, and the game will require that you make small changes to their appearances, such as the color of their jackets.

On the gameplay front, players found that most characters have long TTK (time to kill), and that translates to longer matches, and players who get away from otherwise certain kills. These and other gameplay details seem to be intended to be the difference maker that will make players choose to play Concord, over competitors like Overwatch 2, and the upcoming Marvel Rivals.

Some players feel Firewalk made a very good game. Some others concede that there’s something to it, but they didn’t actually enjoy it. And there were players who claimed, in spite of these things Firewalk is doing differently, there isn’t enough there to convince them to move away from their chosen hero shooters.

All of that is subjective, but what isn’t subjective are the player counts. We can’t see how many players went on on PSN, but SteamDB data on how many Steam players were on the Concord beta is not great. It peaked at 1,124 players, and by the end of the extended playtime yesterday at 12 PM PDT, the game was down to 297 players.

So this coming weekend will be the open beta, where anyone who is interested can give Concord a try. If these previews have gotten people interested, we may see better numbers coming out then. Whether more positive impressions lead to people being willing to pay $ 40 for a hero shooter, will again be a completely different matter.