Concord Beta – Technical Review
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Up, up and away
Sometimes you can glean a great deal from a name, Concord, the new hero shooter from PlayStation Studios new team Firewalk Studios has some similarities with the looming, expensive, supersonic Airplane. Founded in 2018 and acquired by Sony in 2022, a CGI reveal in 2023 demonstrated a Destiny-X-Overwatch meets Guardians of the Galaxy persona accompanied with a bright, pastel shaded modern computer graphic character design set the tone of the studios aims. A Hero shooter at heart, with a new & tidy, bright, fast and wide roster to pick from and shoot at. Team fortress, and its sequel, really started it all, but we had older versions such as Fur Fighters, but Battleborne and Overwatch were the headline grabbers that caused the market to be swamped. Thanks to Sony sending me Closed beta code and then the open beta last weekend I gave the game a full test across PS5 and PC, which aside more maps, weapons, DLC and such aspects I will cover at the end. This is close to what the full game will run like come launch later this month.
Graphics, Technology, Resolution PS5, PC
PS5 Visuals and resolution first then, from a PC settings perspective PS5 looks to be at Maximum or High settings, which are so minimal in difference it is really a mute conversation. The art is bright and tonal with a clean but shaded style to surfaces and objects. It is built using Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 and this means a great basis for materials, lighting, shadows, particles and such and of course we struggle to get a bad looking game on the engine, image quality non with standing, which is true here. Objects have a solid and detailed look, brick, cloth, skin, brass all have sufficient light propagation to convince. Maps are well lit with a mix of light sources, and shadows and styles to create an individual style to each. Global illumination bounce hits your weapon and hands as you rin through certain sections and although a very static world largely lit by sun, moon or other single source it has a definite destiny vibe to it, albeit with a much brighter rainbow like colour palette.
Characters are probably the best visual point though, with the pre-rendered CGI story segments using the same assets as the in-game ones. And these are well animated, emotive and with the engines excellent per pixel motion blur look and move brilliantly both in game, with the fps view on guns and hands, but best in the roster picker at the start of each match. Some of the team came from game and movie production and you can see the cross over best here in the models and film like quality and style they have. However, this is not a stand-out any more and due to the fact the actual gameplay models are usually lower LoDS and further away they look far more standard in action. Compounding the low overall impact the visuals and levels have is that fact they are very static, flat and largely just a square room with warrens running through them into kill boxes, criss-cross high and low segments or a focal point each one converges at. Shadows although good quality are mostly static and even moving objects, such as buntings, have a static map with no motion. This, along with almost zero world interaction and physics, leaves a game that feels very old in comparison to two generation old titles, such as the excellent Dice Battlefield 4 which ran on the PS3 and X360 with visual quality, PBR materials, vehicles, physics destruction and vastly larger maps and player counts than this. And at 60fps on PS4 and certainly PS4pro or X1X. Here on the PS5 and PC this is of Call of Duty/Destiny levels of interaction and, again reinforces that was the clear aim from the team’s inception.
This is all true of the PC release which shares identical visuals and quality at the maximum settings just with options to extend to higher resolution, frame rates and the full suite of reconstruction and interpolation options, a good selection of option, but more of a plug n play menu to pick from now by the team with the engine supporting Native, TAA, TSR, DLSS, FSR3 and XeSS which due to the games art style, low to no foliage and sub pixel details is stil clean and sharp at 1440p or higher. You do get some shimmer on thin elements such as grates and when DoF is used on backgrounds. DLSS again is best but aside comparisons they all look very close at similar target output resolutions. Lower end PC’s will need to drop resolutions though as the game can become GPU bound due to this even on my RX6800 at 1440p Native.
Performance
60fps for an online FPS is a standard now really and it hits that well here, as a beta this is always possible that improvements will come, but it is mostly a locked and stable 16ms refresh with no options (within the closed and open beta at least) of anything higher than this. So 120fps is off the cards for consoles owners but not for engine not being able, as PC has higher options and both DLSS and FSR3 frame generation options are available, something ironically useful here and it can become, bizarrely, CPU bound even on my Zen5600X CPU. This may also be the cause of some dips under 60fps on PS5 as well, with it dipping a frame or two on certain maps whilst running around and it can also dip into the low 50s with large alpha effects such as explosion, volume like smoke and 3 or more characters on screen. This are short lived, always within the next 33ms refresh but do show areas the team could improve here. The PS5 looks to use FSR3 with the same flickering issues noted when PC uses the same settings and this appears to be dynamic, with counts changing from approx.. 3840×2160 to 2259×1271, it likely scales to a 1662p high and shifts as needed between these points. We can see that on my RX6800 GPU even 1440p can dip to similar or lower levels that PS5 but also can go above at higher frame rates, so this would align with GPU expectations.
PC is a mix though and highlights more issues with the game and certainly memory and CPU demands. Currently is does not work at all on Steam Deck, with it no being able to start due to missing functionality. A large potential market for the game but I assume it would perform badly at present anyway, tested on my RTX4050 laptop which highlights the CPU and memory demands best. We struggle to lock to a smooth frame time on any map and even using 1440p DLSS balanced with a 120fps target we are clearly CPU and then/or memory bound by the 6GB of Vram and the game is page swapping often as you run around. This streaming in and out of map data makes this PC in this beta borderline unplayable as the game can stutter for upwards of 300ms and this feels horrible to play and with a mouse and keyboard I simply could not play it at all. Even lowering settings and using frame generation make no impact as this adds even more memory demands and the game is simply waiting on render work, so this is a no no in its current guise on this machine. I hope the team work hard to heavily optimise the games memory use, temp buffers and DX12 use as to push out such a large portion of you accessible market for a 100% online focused title, that will live and die by its players base, this is not a good start.
My 16GB RX6800 fairs much better and was my preferred platform to play the game on in fact, simply because I could run the game into the 100fps range and here it becomes almost 100% CPU bound, which again is a shock an something the team need to address as 120fps should be possible on such a relatively simple game design, player count and map size. That said, a close lock on 60fps using max settings at 1440p does play great with mouse/key or controller and fluidity offered by boosting this up to 120fps without frame generation at 1440p FSR3 balanced made the game feel much more responsive and precise and I hope the team certainly look to integrate a high performance mode on PS5 using VRR and a 1080p lower bounds to get it into the 90s which would help the games input latency which is much better on this PC and or better and not up with the mighty CoD levels just yet.
Gameplay
This is the weakest area though in my opinion, on the one hand I get the aims here to create a team focused raid style game. Each character has their unique traits, some faster with a dash boost to evade enemies, snipers with 2 shot kills, hulks like tanks with strong defense and powerful attacks, Tactics come from the teams mixed skills, drop a tracer to identify enemies on a capture the flag mode, build walls to create a kill box to force enemies into, drop a health pack to maintain team mates (as you can only heal via map pick-ups, dropped packs from teams or some characters have a self heal). Others can drop a teleport pod to quickly warp back to that point when under fire or fly up when needed to make aiming harder. The problem is many games and teams just ran off and you are then playing single style making the best choice normally the one with the best mix of speed, precision and firepower. Map design also falls down here as although not big, they are often too big for the 5v5 max the game sets as a limit. Worse still if some leave during play with some games becoming 5 v 1. Meaning, you can spend minutes of a map running around trying to find someone to shoot at and often miss the battles or be shot in the back. Verticality is non-existent with at most some offering a high vantage point on a central path route, but this becomes an easy camping spot for snipers or a kill room if the entire team sit inside and get stormed. The skills are not diverse enough across the 16 heroes and many of them are themes of the same, in reality the split of types is about 5. Fast but weak, Strong but slow, Powerful but limited ammo, agile and flight but medium power and a mix of these 4 across the rest. They also look very generic from a design perspective and non stand-out as recognisable 5 minutes after you leave the game. It would have been much better to be more extreme with the designs to cater for a wider audience as, in my opinion at least, the point of a hero shooter is you pick the one you like the look of first but then gravitate to the one that matches your play style best. The colour schemes both on characters and maps hinders this more though, with each being shades of purple, orange, reds and some look very similar I did find myself thinking at times if this was the same map or not. Not enough maps or game types to pick from and, across both weekends, I could spend 5 minutes looking for a match on the ranked sections and the rival games are the best but if you die early one they can be a slow drain to the next match. As such the group capture the flag or straight team death match with card collections are the go to because they are the fastest to play, most energetic and allow you to change characters and test. Although with only 1 char per team, you can find your favourite is taken forcing you to pick another closest to them or just to test out.
Initial Thoughts
Fresh on the back of another Hero shooter in Kill the Suicide Squad, this also feels late to the party. It is not a bad looking game with good use of textures, materials and lighting with some GI bounce and shadow maps, but most are baked in it seems. From a technical perspective I would have expected this to be 120fps out of the box on PS5 based on the player count and map design. The Static world Lacks flair, excitement and style, the characters, although never bad, more non-de-script and thus fail to make a big or lasting impression. The weapons/abilities do not create enough diversity to shake up most games and the time to kill can be very slow to instant based on the level of each which can make for some frustrating games. Slow game loop and map design that fails to deliver tight, fast paced combat or high tactics based play means it misses both ends of the gameplay spectrum. The score sheet at the end of the game highlights it best for me, not being clear on what each column is, trying to reward all players for taking part rather than winning and ultimately falling into the classic trap of trying to please everyone ends up pleasing no-one.
Although not a bad performer on PS5 or PC it certainly performs worse than what many, included myself, would have expected and I feel a far wider array of maps, gameplay modes and player versus player count should be a focus early on from the team to increase player base. A 120fps mode on consoles and improved CPU and Memory use could be a quick win for headline news but the promise of regular weekly story segments and the marketing animated clips on social media show they may have the focus on the wrong end of the player engagement slider. I hope we see a ton of updates to the core gameplay loop and choice close to launch to ensure this Concurd does not fly high, and then fall down like its namesake.
