With Concord’s launch subsequent week on August 23, we needed to take a second to speak about the adventure that lies ahead. We see launch as simply the starting. The start of not solely the imaginative and prescient we’ve set out for Harmony, but additionally the starting of how we assist and develop the recreation with our gamers.
The bottom recreation is a basis for us to construct upon over time, via techniques that can increase the universe, introduce new methods to play and grasp every character, provide you with a whole lot of distinctive rewards to earn and unlock, and narratives to unfold week after week, alongside seasonal updates that can introduce new characters, new maps and worlds, new modes, new tales, new options, and extra.*
As we glance ahead to launch, right here’s a glimpse of what’s to return in Harmony:
Harmony Season 1 launching this October
From the very starting, we needed Harmony to be an entire expertise, the place all core content material is out there to you on day-one and shifting ahead—not gated behind paid expansions or a Battle Move. We take your funding in the recreation critically and wish to be sure that we carry all gamers alongside for the journey.
Our first main content material drop will arrive in October with the launch of Harmony Season 1: The Tempest. Season 1 will mark the introduction of a model new playable Freegunner, in addition to a brand-new map, new Freegunner Variants, extra earnable cosmetics and rewards, and a brand new season of weekly Cinematic Vignettes that can proceed the story of the Northstar crew.
With season 1, we’ll even be introducing an in-game retailer for these seeking to personalize their Freegunners additional with extra customization gadgets and to proceed to assist the recreation. These will complement the a whole lot of rewards earnable via development and can be solely beauty, non-compulsory, and don’t have any gameplay influence.
We’re additionally laborious at work on future seasons, starting with Season 2 launching in January 2025 and extra seasonal drops all through 12 months one in all Harmony. We are able to’t wait to completely unpack what we have now in retailer for Season 1 ahead of its launch in October.
The continual evolution of your crew
Once we first fashioned Firewalk, we thought loads about the kind of recreation that we needed to make and what we might add to the multiplayer FPS style. We knew we needed to concentrate on the fundamentals that may make an FPS recreation nice: exact, responsive gunplay and quick, fluid mobility. These qualities needed to be the bedrock of all the things.
Nevertheless, we additionally needed that particular spice offered by character talents. Past the influence their talents, roles, and kits might have in moment-to-moment fight, we noticed thrilling alternatives so as to add strategic layers to how and once you select to deploy them all through a match. In impact, we needed to infuse the theorycrafting of a deck builder with a PVP first-person shooter. This turned the root of our Crew Builder system.
Crew Builder means that you can create Customized Crews of Freegunners that you just carry right into a match. Each Customized Crew gives 12 configurable slots, which you’ll fill with characters from what’s going to change into a rising roster of Freegunners and their Variants. Every Freegunner could have a number of Variants, that are distinctive variations of every character which have particular modifiers to their base talents and may be unlocked by finishing varied in-game challenges.
Every Customized Crew will need to have 5 distinctive Freegunners, however you possibly can stack as much as three copies of any given Freegunner’s Variants, empowering you to essentially concentrate on particular characters that you just prefer to play as and that align finest with the broader make-up of your staff, the modes you’re enjoying, or your normal playstyle.
Nevertheless, whereas Crew Builder allows you to hone your individual distinctive method to fight technique, it’s additionally meant to encourage experimentation with totally different characters as effectively. Every Customized Crew comes with 4 Again Up slots, that are randomly populated with Freegunners not in any other case in your Customized Crew.
Crew Builder additionally incentivizes you to populate your Customized Crews with characters of various roles. In contrast to conventional archetypes, like Tank or Help, every Freegunner in Harmony is supposed to ship high-DPS and be efficient in a gunfight. As a substitute, our characters are outlined by one in all six distinct roles and the influence they’ll have in fight—whether or not that’s locking down an space, dominating lengthy sightlines, or flanking enemies.
Balancing your crew with Freegunners of various roles can provide you an edge via particular in-match advantages referred to as Crew Bonuses. Whenever you deploy Freegunners of various roles for the first time throughout a match, you’re granted particular bonuses that may improve mobility, enhance weapon recoil, cut back cooldown occasions, and extra that apply to any character you deploy from that time on.
Whenever you mix all of those techniques—Crew Builder, Again-Up Slots, Freegunner Variants, and Crew Bonuses—there’s a lot depth to how one can craft, refine, and grasp your builds in Harmony as your expertise grows. It additionally permits the meta to evolve repeatedly in thrilling new methods, as you unlock new Freegunner Variants and new Freegunners and Variants are launched over time with every season.
In the end, once we step again and take into consideration what drew us to make Harmony and what we love most about multiplayer video games, it’s precisely that: the potential for steady evolution. It’s the thrill of the potential potentialities of the place we are able to take the expertise shifting ahead. And it’s the sense of adventure of discovering out, collectively.
Put together for launch
We are able to’t wait to welcome you to the Harmony galaxy and see the way you study and grasp every Freegunner and all of our techniques in new and thrilling methods, starting with Harmony’s Early Entry launch for Digital Deluxe Version house owners on Tuesday, August 20 and adopted by our world launch on Friday, August 23. Pre-load for all editions on PS5 will start right now, Tuesday, August 13.
Servers for Harmony’s Early Entry launch on August 20 will go dwell at 10:00am PDT | 7:00pm CEST | 2:00am (August 21) JST.
For all the newest on Harmony, make sure you observe us on Twitter/X, Instagram, and TikTok, in addition to by becoming a member of the neighborhood in the Official Concord Discord.
*Account for PlayStation Community and web connection required. Paid for PlayStation Plus membership (offered individually) required on PS5.