When Concord recently kicked off Sony’s latest State of Play, the team’s reception at DF Direct Weekly was hardly positive. The presentation began with a pre-rendered CG video that displayed a level of graphical quality far beyond what was realistically possible from the final game, while Concord’s actual game reveal also struggled to escape comparisons to Overwatch . That said, we wanted to get our hands on the game, and a recent beta gave us the chance to do just that: try out both the PlayStation 5 and PC versions for ourselves – and it’s fair to say, we’re now more optimistic about its prospects. There’s no doubt that this is a well-made game, but is it a must-play? We’re still not sure.
In the video below, you can see that both John Linneman and Tom Morgan have put a fair few hours into the game on PS5 and two PC setups. This is a current-gen exclusive, and with that in mind, it opens up the potential for developer Firewalk Studios to really push the visual bar. It’s also worth noting that the game is based on Unreal Engine 5, but in order to maintain both image quality and a firm grip on 60fps performance, the engine’s most advanced technologies don’t appear to have been deployed this time around.
Microgeometry with Nanite is not used at all, while the real-time global illumination that Lumen provides is also missing. In all fairness, high-end tech is hardly essential in this style of gaming, and Concord’s approach to ‘baked’ (i.e. pre-calculated) indirect lighting and shadows still impresses. Visually, there’s some strong art direction here: Concord looks good, it has character, and it goes some way towards delivering the kind of Guardians of the Galaxy meets next-gen Overwatch that developer Firewalk Studios is aiming for.
The bright, vibrant style is directly inspired by Overwatch , but UE5 takes things considerably further: physically based materials shine in Concord, while character rendering looks top-notch, bolstered by great animation and some exceptional facial captures. This matters, because Concord is a character-based game, and seeing those characters interact so convincingly in cutscenes only adds to the appeal.
Other elements of the presentation also stand out – such as the seamless transitions that presumably cover level loading, along with effective use of motion blur. This is limited to the view weapon and characters, as befits a competitively focused game. Another plus? We’ve spoken out against the presence of intrusive stutters in Unreal Engine titles , but whether it’s shader compilation issues or traversal hitching, the good news is that Concord is free of both.
In terms of image quality, Concord delivers a native 1440p resolution on the PlayStation 5, upscaled to native 4K – as we’d hope for a UE5 title that doesn’t utilise all the most demanding feature sets – while deviations from the targeted 60 frames per second are minimal and rare (55fps at worst). Over on the PC side of things, cranking things up to ultra quality doesn’t appear to be particularly taxing on the GPU side of things (we tested at native 4K, albeit on RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 systems). There do appear to be some significant demands on the CPU though, with some frame generation required to hit the desired 120fps.
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Along with frame-gen, all the standard spatial/temporal upscalers are present: Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR, and Epic’s own TSR. That said, it’s a shame that the game apparently doesn’t support HDR on PC – with a game this vibrant, it’s an unfortunate omission. On the plus side, we can confirm that the game does support HDR on PS5.
All in all, Concord is in pretty good shape. The beta only yielded four different maps, but it still provided a healthy sampler for the game ahead of its August 23rd release. Even our own John Linneman – hardly a fan of live service titles or “hero shooters” such as these – enjoyed his time with the game.
There are still concerns about Sony’s approach to the live service model, however. Like Helldivers 2, Concord is not a free-to-play game, despite widespread belief to the contrary. At £34.99/$39.99 it’s clearly cheaper than Sony’s typical triple-A fare, but the point is that the game is in direct competition with free-to-play titles – Overwatch 2 being the prime example. Whether the game has the quality or depth to justify its price remains to be seen, but the technical fundamentals at least appear solid. If there’s more to report, we’ll return to Concord closer to its August 23 release date.