Concord's persistent deployables have players building makeshift forts out of healing pads, shields, and walls

An unusual feature of Sony's new hero shooter, Concord, is that deployable items—healing pads, shields, walls, that kind of thing—are persistent between rounds and respawns. If the other team doesn't destroy your stuff, it stays where it is across an entire match.

I liked the idea when I heard it just for its novelty, but wasn't sure how big a deal it would be in practice. Now that Concord's first beta has started , I can say it's definitely not a trivial quirk: It's really goofy in a way that I've so far found a lot of fun, though that might just be because my team absolutely killed it with the deployables strategy in my last match.

One of Concord's modes is a no-respawn mode where rounds are won either by eliminating the other team or capturing a single point in the center of the map. The first team to win four rounds wins the match.

I am not quite as clever as my teammates, who spent the first two rounds loading up the capture point with healing pads, shields, and privacy walls, building us a fortress of glowing energy fields which we sprinted to and huddled in for the subsequent rounds—we won in  a clean sweep.

The other team was likely still getting to grips with the game: They could've focused their fire on our shields to take them out so they could bust up all our healing pads. But since they let us have our special little health spa right on the point, we were pretty unstoppable: I'd pop out, shoot at one of them, and then run back inside to heal up, and repeat.

In another mode, one where the goal is to grab an object at the center of the map and extract it at one of two points, the persistency of deployables couldn't be exploited in such an obvious way, but I did stick a healing pad behind a half-wall near our side of the pickup point for the extraction item. That proved to be a huge help, since there was always a short skirmish there before one team grabbed the item and made a run for it.

My healing pad stayed put for that entire match, which relates to another notable effect of deployable persistence: It lets you benefit from a specific character's ability without having to play them every round. It's one of the ways Concord encourages character switching, which it's very big on.

After every respawn or round, you're presented with the character select screen, and selecting different types of characters gives you "crew bonuses" over the course of the match. For example, if you pick Daw, the character who drops those healing pads and shields, future characters you pick will have faster reloads due to his Tactician crew bonus.

It's possible that big deployable forts won't make it to the high-level meta, but the notion that you shouldn't stick with the same character for an entire match seems like it might be embedded deep enough in Concord to stick around even when people get serious.

The current Concord beta is only open to pre-orderers and PlayStation Plus subscribers, but next week there'll be an open beta— here are the full details from Sony. If you're jumping in, too, I can't recommend enough picking Daw in the first round or two. Just drop those healing pads and shields in safe and convenient spots, or if you're brave, stick them directly on the point.