Somehow, Concord Returned

Concord is online again after being shut down, thanks to a group of modders who have revived the game through custom servers. The revival comes over a year after Sony delisted the hero shooter, shut everything down, and effectively closed the book on one of the quickest live-service endings in recent memory.

The fan-made build of Concord is still very much a work in progress, but it nonetheless works well enough to prove the project is real and moving forward. For a game many likely assumed would never be touched again, the idea that a match has already happened is unexpected in the best way, and it gives Concord a second chapter that no one saw coming.

Concord Is Playable Again, Thanks to Dedicated Fans

Concord never really recovered from the way it launched. It entered the hero-shooter scene with a full price tag in a genre where most players expect something free, and that alone put it at a disadvantage. Once people did get in, it quickly set in that the game didn’t offer much that separated it from everything already competing for attention in the genre, so the buzz dropped fast.

Player numbers naturally followed, which made the experience feel thinner every week. At that point, it was hard for anyone to believe the game would build momentum, and Sony eventually made the call to shut down Concord completely.

Now, as mentioned in a recent Kotaku article, thanks to the efforts of some modders, Concord is playable again on fan-made servers — though it’s currently in a rough, still-in-development state. This step forward comes from a community-led effort involving developers who go by Red, open_wizard, and gwog. Red recently told members in the project’s Discord server that Concord is now running through custom servers:

“Hey. After a long time of reverse engineering & server development, we just managed to play a match of Concord! The project is still WIP, it’s playable, but buggy. Once our servers are fully set up, we’ll begin doing some private playtesting, if anyone here wants to join those playtests, let me know.”

For now, Concord‘s return is limited, a bit messy, and held together by a small team of people who simply wanted to see the game working again. Even so, the fact that it runs at all is a surprise that gives the community something they never expected. Whether the project grows or stays small is still unknown, but the door is open again in a way it hasn’t been since the shutdown.