Watch On
Generally an amazing TV tie-in may give a sport a recognition enhance—The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 each acquired Netflix bumps—nevertheless it would not appear doubtless that an upcoming TV brief primarily based on the world of Harmony may have the identical impact, on condition that the hero shooter cannot even be bought anymore. Sony and developer Firewalk are taking Harmony offline this week after a dismal participant turnout; it did not even crack 1,000 concurrents on Steam.
In a deal that should’ve occurred effectively earlier than any of us even knew about Harmony, nonetheless, Sony secured its inclusion in upcoming Prime Video anthology sequence Secret Stage, whose 15 episodes are every impressed by a special sport or video games. The sequence will premiere this December.
Firewalk says it should “discover choices” for bringing Harmony again, however video games which can be fully un-launched like this typically do not return, and Harmony could be a part of the graveyard the place Anthem, Crucible, and Artifact are interred.
That may make the Secret Stage episode a little bit of an ungainly watch. Absolutely it was conceived of and written with the assumption that Harmony can be considerably common by the point it aired, or on the very least nonetheless exist. The sci-fi shooter’s characters had been meant to be one in every of its huge attracts; Firewalk deliberate weekly cutscenes about their house adventures.
Even earlier than it launched for $40, Harmony struggled to get gamers into its free open beta, so I feel it is secure to say that the characters and world didn’t ignite imaginations. Their life like (if typically alien) faces have been interpreted as bland up in opposition to the cartoony mugs of Overwatch characters, and my take is that all of them appear so good that it is arduous to think about them entering into gunfights.
However that is simply a part of Harmony’s drawback. As I wrote final week, its lineage and aggressive hooks—former Future 2 devs doing area and goal modes with an emphasis on strategic character switching—clearly did not snag any subset of latest aggressive shooter gamers. I preferred elements of Harmony, however the Overwatch crowd did not go for it, the Counter-Strike crowd did not go for it, and the Name of Obligation crowd did not go for it, no less than not in any critical numbers.
Possibly it will make for common TV, although? That is the type of dramatic irony I’ve come to count on from video games, and I can already image what the response will probably be if the episode seems to be a banger: “Why did not Sony present us this?”