Launch and the journey forward – PlayStation.Weblog

With Harmony’s launch subsequent week on August 23, we needed to take a second to speak in regards to the journey that lies forward. We see launch as only the start. The start of not solely the imaginative and prescient we’ve set out for Harmony, but in addition the start of how we help and develop the sport with our Gamers.

The bottom recreation is a basis for us to construct upon over time, by means of programs that may increase the universe, introduce new methods to play and grasp every character, provide you with a whole lot of distinctive rewards to earn and unlock, and narratives to unfold week after week, alongside seasonal updates that may introduce new characters, new maps and worlds, new modes, new tales, new options, and extra.*

As we sit up for launch, right here’s a glimpse of what’s to come back in Harmony:

Harmony Season 1 launching this October

From the very starting, we needed Harmony to be an entire expertise, the place all core content material is on the market to you on day-one and transferring ahead—not gated behind paid expansions or a Battle Go. We take your funding within the recreation severely and need to make sure that we carry all gamers alongside for the journey.

Our first main content material drop will arrive in October with the launch of Harmony Season 1: The Tempest. Season 1 will mark the introduction of a model new playable Freegunner, in addition to a brand-new map, new Freegunner Variants, extra earnable cosmetics and rewards, and a brand new season of weekly Cinematic Vignettes that may proceed the story of the Northstar crew.

With season 1, we’ll even be introducing an in-game retailer for these trying to personalize their Freegunners additional with further customization gadgets and to proceed to help the sport. These will complement the a whole lot of rewards earnable by means of development and will likely be solely beauty, non-compulsory, and haven’t any gameplay influence.

We’re additionally exhausting at work on future seasons, starting with Season 2 launching in January 2025 and extra seasonal drops all through 12 months one in every of Harmony. We will’t wait to totally unpack what we’ve got in retailer for Season 1 forward of its launch in October.

The continual evolution of your crew

Once we first fashioned Firewalk, we thought lots about the kind of recreation that we needed to make and what we may add to the multiplayer FPS style. We knew we needed to concentrate on the basics that may make an FPS recreation nice: exact, responsive gunplay and quick, fluid mobility. These qualities needed to be the bedrock of all the pieces.

Nevertheless, we additionally needed that particular spice offered by character talents. Past the iNFLuence their talents, roles, and kits may have in moment-to-moment fight, we noticed thrilling alternatives so as to add strategic layers to how and while you select to deploy them all through a match. In impact, we needed to infuse the theorycrafting of a deck builder with a PVP first-person shooter. This grew to become the foundation of our Crew Builder system.

Crew Builder lets you create Customized Crews of Freegunners that you simply carry right into a match. Each Customized Crew affords 12 configurable slots, which you’ll fill with characters from what is going to develop into a rising roster of Freegunners and their Variants. Every Freegunner can have a number of Variants, that are distinctive variations of every character which have particular modifiers to their base talents and will be unlocked by finishing numerous in-Game challenges.

Every Customized Crew will need to have 5 distinctive Freegunners, however you possibly can stack as much as three copies of any given Freegunner’s Variants, empowering you to essentially concentrate on particular characters that you simply prefer to play as and that align greatest with the broader make-up of your workforce, the modes you’re enjoying, or your common playstyle.

Nevertheless, whereas Crew Builder allows you to hone your personal distinctive strategy to fight technique, it’s additionally meant to encourage experimentation with totally different characters as effectively. Every Customized Crew comes with 4 Again Up slots, that are randomly populated with Freegunners not in any other case in your Customized Crew.

Crew Builder additionally incentivizes you to populate your Customized Crews with characters of various roles. Not like conventional archetypes, like Tank or Assist, every Freegunner in Harmony is supposed to ship high-DPS and be efficient in a gunfight. As an alternative, our characters are outlined by one in every of six distinct roles and the influence they’ll have in fight—whether or not that’s locking down an space, dominating lengthy sightlines, or flanking enemies.

Balancing your crew with Freegunners of various roles may give you an edge by means of particular in-match advantages referred to as Crew Bonuses. Once you deploy Freegunners of various roles for the primary time throughout a match, you’re granted particular bonuses that may enhance mobility, enhance weapon recoil, cut back cooldown instances, and extra that apply to any character you deploy from that time on.

Once you mix all of those programs—Crew Builder, Again-Up Slots, Freegunner Variants, and Crew Bonuses—there’s a lot depth to how one can craft, refine, and grasp your builds in Harmony as your expertise grows. It additionally permits the meta to evolve repeatedly in thrilling new methods, as you unlock new Freegunner Variants and new Freegunners and Variants are launched over time with every season.

In the end, after we step again and take into consideration what drew us to make Harmony and what we love most about multiplayer video games, it’s precisely that: the potential for steady evolution. It’s the fun of the potential prospects of the place we will take the expertise transferring ahead. And it’s the sense of journey of discovering out, collectively.

Put together for launch

We will’t wait to welcome you to the Harmony galaxy and see the way you study and grasp every Freegunner and all of our programs in new and thrilling methods, starting with Harmony’s Early Entry launch for Digital Deluxe Version homeowners on Tuesday, August 20 and adopted by our world launch on Friday, August 23. Pre-load for all editions on PS5 will start at this time, Tuesday, August 13.

Servers for Harmony’s Early Entry launch on August 20 will go dwell at 10:00am PDT | 7:00pm CEST | 2:00am (August 21) JST.

For all the newest on Harmony, you should definitely comply with us on Twitter/X, Instagram, and TikTok, in addition to by becoming a member of the group within the Official Harmony Discord.

*Account for PlayStation Community and web connection required. Paid for PlayStation Plus membership (bought individually) required on PS5.