Highguard is a pretty fun game. I stand by that sentiment.
After playing it at a preview event in Los Angeles the week before it launched, I thought it had awesome potential. Everyone else at the event agreed. We were put in a room to play for hours and interview developers, and we all felt that it was unique title from experienced industry veterans that combined existing ideas into something new. It mattered not.
Just two weeks after launching Highguard, Wildlight Entertainment was hit with mass layoffs, leaving behind a small core team to work on the game after it failed to grab hold of players or create the revenue it apparently needed to survive. Since then, I’ve seen people celebrating the loss of jobs and the title’s failure on social media, and I’m beyond sick and tired of it.
Highguard failed for a variety of reasons, and no one single facet is to blame. The Game Awards trailer was just plain bad, and not representative of how the game plays at all. Its placement as the “one more thing” at the end of the show also doomed it in the eyes of many at best, while at worst, others chose it had to be dead on arrival from then on. We now know that Wildlight had no say in that, and it sucks.
The radio silence between then and launch was also a mistake, because the negativity online only grew from there with no response. Day one issues like bad PC performance only solidified the “told you so” mentality of everyone who said it would be a disaster based on the trailer. And I think that Wildlight was a bit cocky with their mantra of letting the game speak for itself, too, along with trusting the pedigree of those on the dev team.
All of these things combined to kill any sort of momentum it could have had on day one, despite around 100,000 trying the game out on Steam. The negativity continued with a swath of scathing reviews from players with less than an hour played, and so the dogpiling wore on. I do not believe that many of those players went into the game with hope or an open mind, and that they instead were ready to shit on it for the meme or whatever else.
Even content creators who enjoyed the game were quickly forced to move on from it thanks to their chats dogging on it, and it just escalated from there. Social media is such a powerful tool in the world today, in so many ways. Public opinion is shaped by it, and when the algorithm rewards negative or outright inflammatory language, then this sort of thing is to be expected. But blaming players alone is not the answer here.
In retrospect, releasing the game in early access or inviting players to beta test the title would have maybe given it a better chance. The roster of characters is rather bland and uninteresting, for the most part, and in a hero shooter they are very important (look at Overwatch or Marvel Rivals). The general masses found the looting period to be boring and slow, and the maps too big. These things could have been fixed if players were invited to help out from day one (they have been tweaked in updates since the game launched), but the former Apex Legends devs were dead-set on doing another shadowdrop. This was also clearly now a mistake.
It’s easy to see now that Highguard’s rollout was mishandled in several ways, and the overwhelmingly negative public sentiment around the game after its Game Awards debut was too much to overcome, alongside several other legitimate complaints. But even with multiple good rapid-fire updates including requested quality-of-life changes in the weeks that followed launch, players had made up their minds and moved on.
But my main issue with how this has all gone down is, why is anyone celebrating a game failing, or people losing their jobs? As a gamer, I want all games to do well. Obviously, that’s not possible, and the space is increasingly more and more crowded, so it’s becoming more difficult to stand out with each passing release. But this “gamer cancel culture” where people seemingly love to see something fail is just tiring, and those who attack the devs themselves online need to be ostracized. It’s not just the devs, either. Anyone who talks about how they enjoy Highguard online are also getting needlessly targeted. It’s embarrassing.
I just can’t get into the mindset of those who are relishing in another doomed live service title, more jobs lost, and more livelihoods upended. Especially since Wildlight was built by and for devs who wished to get out from under the AAA umbrella of companies like EA and Activision and make their own thing.
That thing turned out to be vehemently disliked by the masses, for one reason or another, and now they must begin to rebuild yet again. It makes me sad. I really don’t understand how this sort of thing could make you happy, and I don’t think I want to engage with anyone that feels this way.
