Earlier right now, shortly after 1 PM Japanese, Harmony’s servers went offline. Ryan Ellis, sport director at Harmony developer Firewalk Studios, had introduced the closure of the 5v5 hero shooter in an official PlayStation weblog publish printed earlier this week on September 3, 2024—simply 11 days after Harmony’s launch.
Harmony bought poorly on PC, drawing an all-time-peak of 660 simultaneous gamers on Steam. “Whereas many qualities of the expertise resonated with gamers, we additionally acknowledge that different elements of the sport and our preliminary launch didn’t land the best way we’d supposed,” Ellis wrote within the publish asserting Harmony’s closure.
Relatively than its $40 price ticket or its forged of characters, Tyler Wilde wrote final week that Harmony’s actual difficulty was its failure to promote “a fantasy or a story that is getting FPS gamers excited to play it within the first place—earlier than they’ve even determined whether or not they like its weapons, characters, and modes.” Alongside the best way, it turned the goal of widespread derision and a casualty in our endless tradition conflict.
Regardless of its near-immediate downfall, Harmony nonetheless had its supporters. Gamers have been in matches till the final doable second, and since a few of them have been streaming because the server plugs have been pulled, we will see the way it appeared as Harmony went offline—and the way its followers reacted.
Streamer gwtmori was mid-sentence when he captured the second Harmony’s server have been shuttered, saying the way it’d be “spectacular if we obtained Lennox to stage 69” earlier than the sport went offline. His seek for a brand new match was interrupted by an error message a few “model mismatch,” which rapidly booted him again to Harmony’s launch display. “Guys, what an enormous fucking honor,” gwtmori advised his viewers as they commiserated over the sport’s closing.
Elsewhere, Japanese streamer Nog7_ had simply began a brand new spherical when the server shutdown hit. Talking on stream by way of chat text-to-speech, Nog expressed their alarm by repeating the character “あ”. One in all Nog’s viewers, their messages additionally learn on-stream, bid the sport farewell by saying “さよならコンコード,” or “Sayonara, Harmony.”
My favourite glimpse at Harmony’s sort of moments comes from streamer dgunz, and it is three sorts of poetic directly. Because the servers went offline, dgunz was in the course of a firefight; within the clip, because the display goes black you possibly can see the subtitles for characters calling out, by way of this void, that they are “badly broken” and “want a hand.” As the conclusion units in, a wordless dgunz salutes the fallen videogame. An error popup seems from dgunz’s PS5 with a poignant message: “One thing went incorrect.”
I hadn’t performed any Harmony throughout its brief lifespan, however there’s one thing touching concerning the streams of its final minutes on-line. These have been folks taking part in and sharing their time with a sport for the straightforward purpose that they loved it, regardless of important consensus, common opinion, and Sony’s personal execution order. I love it.
Within the weblog publish asserting Harmony’s closure, Ellis stated Sony and Firewalk would “discover choices” for the sport “whereas we decide the very best path forward.” We’ll have to attend and see whether or not that finest path means we’ll be capable to give Harmony one other shot sooner or later.
