You Can Finally Play Concord Again, Kind Of, But Not Really

Live-service failures are becoming an increasingly common sight in the games industry as publishers desperately try to capture the lucrative magic of juggernauts like Fortnite. We’ve seen countless high-profile releases, from the unfortunately titled Babylon’s Fall to the less-than-triumphant Marvel’s Avengers, collapse in on themselves after struggling to carve out a niche in the genre. But none have been as public a spectacle as Concord.

After just two weeks, PlayStation’s flagship hero shooter was taken offline, while players were offered refunds as the game was removed from storefronts. Sony initially stated that it had plans to overhaul Concord for an ambigious future re-release, but those ambitions were quickly put to rest when developer Firewalk Studios was shuttered.

Bungie is now the latest PlayStation studio to be embroiled in a live-service controversy, as Marathon was indefinitely delayed after damning plagiarism accusations were brought forward.

Jump ahead nearly a year, and there’s a surprising update to this controversial live-service saga. As reported by VGC, a playable dev build called ‘FWChaos’, dated November 14, 2023, has been leaked online, showing what the game looked like a full nine months before release. Much like with the retail version, you can’t get past the login screen anymore, but since it’s a pre-release build, you can enable a dev menu to bypass this barrier.

You Can’t Really Do Much In This Version Of Concord, Either

VGC downloaded the build and tried out the pre-release version of Concord first-hand, but there’s not much to see. You can access the Galactic Guide, viewing information on each planet, and a Crew menu, detailing each of the 16 playable characters, but the Job Board only features placeholder text, and the Store expectedly offers up nothing.

However, the Settings menu does have developer options for matchmaking, so perhaps we’ll see this pre-release build used to revitalise the online scene for Concord. Though it’s hard to imagine the misjudged ‘Overwatch killer’, with a peak player count of just 697, having nearly enough enthusiasts for such a project.

The only major benefit this version of the game has is that you can actually get into the main menu, but all you can do is sift through the menus of a game nobody is able to play anymore, half of which are unfinished. It’s an oddity more than anything else: a glimpse into the development of PlayStation’s over $200 million blunder.