Wreck of the Pequod

Tonight brings our first proper look at Concord, as part of the latest PlayStation State of Play.

The first new game developed by Sony's Firewalk Studios, Concord is a sci-fi shooter for PlayStation 5 and PC with a beta in July and a full launch on 23rd August.

There's bags of character on show in the game's cinematic reveal trailer - which clearly owes a lot to James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. Interestingly, Sony has said that each week will bring another small slice of story via a similar vignette, containing deeper dives at the game's characters and ongoing narratives.

Concord's actual gameplay is going to need a little longer to sink in, though. Firewalk's developers say it's influenced by fighting and strategy games, though visually it seems closest to Overwatch.

Here's a look at both:

Concord will launch with 16 characters from a guns-for-hire group known as the Freegunners, and a crew who hang out on a ship named the Northstar. You'll fight other Freegunner groups and duke it out over various modes and maps.

"From powerful mystics and towering robots to skilled gunslingers and snipers, we want each Freegunner's personality and gameplay abilities to come alive in every element of how they play and the strategic considerations they create," Sony wrote.

"Some Freegunners' abilities are made for in-the-moment tactics, including casting walls of fire, throwing exploding knives, or lobbing trash bombs. Others can have an enduring impact on a match, like deployable walls that can block entire lanes, explosive traps, bullet-blocking domes, speed-granting spores, and more that persist across rounds and respawns."

More details on Concord are coming next week, Sony concluded.