Somehow, Concord has returned.
Yes, the one Sony game that lasted a total of two weeks before the company shut it down so completely that it is no longer playable, seems to have come back, but in a very incomplete form.
Video Games Chronicle claim that they acquired a build of the game dated November 14, 2023, codenamed FWChaos. This build is nine months away from the final version that was released in August 2024.
It must also be said, given the nature of game development, that this build may represent a fragment of the game while Firewalk Studios had other builds that represented other parts of it, before they had been all brought together. As you’ll see below, that could possibly explain what Video Games Chronicle found.
That’s because you can’t actually play FWChaos per se. The login screen is already built for PlayStation’s systems, but can be bypassed using a developer’s .ini file. Once you get past that, you enter a Select Freegunner screen, but you won’t be able to get past that either.
What Video Games Chronicle did find is that if you leave that screen and enter the main menu, you can access other menus in the game, and it seems that this build was leaked to show the work developers put into this project.
FWChaos has a partly completed version of the Galactic Guide and Crew Section. This means you can look up each Freegunner character’s description and how they look in their outfits as well as their variants. You also get information on the in-game galaxy planet per planet.
Apparently FWChaos doesn’t have remnants of the rumored weekly cutscenes that could have numbered in at least the double digits. Now, given the circumstances that Sony decided to shut down Concord, it wasn’t likely that FWChaos would ever resurface, and we doubt more detailed or complete builds would come back either.
Sony removed all online functionality for the game completely, as well as refunded all players. In stark contrast, Microsoft allowed the similarly poorly regarded Redfall to get a full year of support after its launch, ending with the closure of its studio, Arkane Austin. While Redfall didn’t get all of its problems fully fixed, the game is still available to buy, with Xbox Play Anywhere and Game Pass, to this day.
As some had speculated, Sony may have erased all remnants of Concord and refunded all players so that they would no longer lose money on the title, and also not have to deal with the consumer protections they would need to honor if they kept the game available. We don’t know if Sony wrote Concord of as a tax write-off, but it seems that in a very similar way to the Batgirl movie, it isn’t legally possible to bring the game back again.
