Somehow Concord came back

Harmony is back online 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 axed the hero shooter, shutting down everything and effectively closing the book on one of the fastest live service endings in recent memory.

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

Concord is playable again, thanks to dedicated fans

Harmony never really recovered from the way it was launched. It entered the hero shooter scene with a full price tag in a genre where most gamers expect something for free, and that alone put it at a disadvantage. Once people got in, it quickly set in that the game didn't offer much that set it apart from everything else that was already competing for attention in the genre, so the buzz quickly died down.

Player numbers naturally followed, making the experience feel thinner each week. At the time, it was hard for anyone to believe the game would build momentum, and Sony eventually called for the shutdown Harmony completely.

Now, as mentioned in a recent Kotaku article, thanks to the efforts of some modders, Harmony playable again on fan-made servers – although currently in a rough state still under development. This step forward comes from a community-led effort involving developers using Red, open_wizard, and gwog. Red recently told members of the project's Discord server that Harmony now run through custom servers:

“Hey. After a long time of reverse engineering and 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 will start doing some private playtesting, if anyone here wants to join those playtests let me know.”

For now, Harmonys return is limited, a bit messy, and held together by a small team of people who simply wanted to see the game work again. Even so, the fact that it works 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.