Sony and Firewalk Studios’ Harmony launches on PlayStation 5 and PC later this month, and faces an uphill battle to success. The team-based hero shooter is, in contrast to a lot of its competitors, a “premium” paid title — which means it’s not free to play like rival shooters Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, and Tom Clancy’s XDefiant.
Harmony will even quickly have extra competitors on that entrance; on PC, there’s hero shooter FragPunk, an upcoming free-to-play recreation from NetEase. Then there’s the launch of Riot Video games’ Valorant (now dwell on consoles as of Friday) and the upcoming NetEase’s Marvel Rivals (now in a closed beta check).
The latter two free-to-play video games have the type of built-in fan bases that Firewalk would most likely like to have. Valorant will launch as a mature product, with 4 years’ value of content material and refinement, and followers of Riot’s video games know that the studio will proceed to help their shooter for years to return; League of Legends will rejoice its fifteenth birthday later this yr. About 6 million folks play Valorant every day, in line with Tracker Community. After which there’s Marvel Rivals, which can star greater than 20 playable Marvel superheroes and villains with many years of historical past behind them. Marvel Rivals’ beta boasts about 40,000 peak gamers on Steam alone, in line with SteamCharts.
Up to now, Harmony hasn’t established a powerful sufficient id to compete with these powerhouses. Participant numbers throughout Harmony’s beta weekends had been worryingly low. The sport has been extensively dismissed by a portion of its potential viewers as lifting closely from Blizzard’s Overwatch and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy characters. What does make Harmony stand out from the competitors is its value; it’s a $39.99 multiplayer recreation in a discipline of free-to-play rivals. It appears like a product of a time now previous; Firewalk began engaged on its multiplayer recreation years in the past, when the Guardians of the Galaxy had been nonetheless scorching, and Blizzard was charging cash for the unique Overwatch.
Firewalk is positioning the pay-to-play facet of Harmony as a constructive. The developer has stated it gained’t put a battle cross into the sport, and can proceed to help the sci-fi shooter with new characters, maps, and modes. That will logically endear it to some gamers who’re bored with the battle cross grind, and the ever-present monetization techniques of free-to-play video games.
However Harmony didn’t appear to attract a lot of an viewers over the course of two beta weekends. The sport’s first beta check interval was initially supposed to be for gamers who had pre-ordered the sport, however an eleventh-hour change in plan opened it as much as anybody with a PlayStation Plus membership. That signaled an absence of pre-order curiosity within the recreation, and a second beta check weekend — open to all gamers on PS5 and PC — didn’t draw a lot enthusiasm both. In response to unofficial information from True Trophies, Harmony’s participant rely dipped 8% from its first beta weekend to its second.
I performed the Harmony beta and located it to be a stable shooter, with attention-grabbing hero kits, distinctive workforce dynamics, and a really slick presentation. However the beta didn’t talk clearly the way to play Harmony; in contrast to the Marvel Rivals beta, Harmony’s playtest shipped with out a tutorial mode. Understanding the sport’s distinctive mechanics required digging right into a text-based information and experimenting underneath the stress of dwell workforce play. Worse, the preliminary deathmatch-style mode that was within the beta at launch, which Harmony pressured gamers to expertise first, failed to spotlight the sport’s character buffs system and vital team-based dynamics. I had some enjoyable with Harmony, however I principally caught with it and dug into the sport’s methods out {of professional} obligation. I doubt it would pull me away from my different live-service video games of selection.
I hope that Harmony finds an viewers, and that gamers who pay $40 for it (and pay for a PlayStation Plus subscription on prime of that) will discover many hundreds of different like-minded teammates and enemies on the market. In the event that they don’t, PlayStation Plus subscribers might profit in the long term, as Harmony feels destined to turn out to be a month-to-month PS Plus giveaway, if early curiosity is any indication.
Harmony is little doubt partly an experiment for PlayStation Studios, half of a bigger plan to crack the profitable live-service recreation area with future titles like Marathon, FairGame$, and unannounced on-line initiatives from Guerrilla Video games and London Studios. Time will inform if the PlayStation fan base that’s keen to fork over money for the likes of God of Struggle, Ghost of Tsushima, and the Spider-Man video games will accomplish that for an untested multiplayer expertise like Harmony.
