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Highguard dev blames content creators for the game's failure - "It was dead on arrival"

Raik said:
The game wouldn't have hooked anyone even if it was shadow dropped. The game looked slow, and was bloated with mechanics that aren't fun.
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NickFire said:
Plenty of games made good money despite sub par reviews. And this game had lots of people try it because of the pre release exposure. The problem was instead of sticking with it and spreading positive word of mouth the people who tried it moved on really fast. That's on the devs. Straight up.
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They got their chance. Even though Keighley acted like a blowhard hyping it up like it's the best shooter in decades, all Wildlight had to do is have a great game to back it up. Shadow dropped with no other info until launch is stupid, but shadow drops happen and can lead to success (Apex). So it's not impossible to be successful going cold turkey in marketing.

But the product was lousy. Who in their right mind would think this is a winning formula?

- Misleading trailer showing it's fast paced COD-ish action on horseback, but the actual game is more like a MOBA with slow build up phases
- 3 vs 3
- Hero based
- Art style and characters being ho hum
- A weird setting with zero lore background info, which includes fantasy, medieval, guns, horses, magical stuff and also planting bombs to blow up generators like it's COD
- Giant maps (no wonder they added horses at double speed)
- One multi phase objectives mode
- No simpler modes like TDM or Domination which every other game has for gamers who want easier to understand and shorter modes
- No beta for gamer feedback and server load tests
- No ranked mode
- No join in progress players or bots to rebalance teams from dropped gamers
- Barebones/no scoreboard and stats
- Boring loot phase
- Base defence is ineffective
- Bad optimization leading to sloppy visuals and frame rates
- Bad netcode
- Some weird issue with Secure Boot for PC gamers (I've never even heard of Secure Boot before until Highguard, but has to do BIOS settings)

And that's what I remember from all the criticism. There's surely more.

I guess the only good thing is it's FTP so it costs gamers $0. But name one person in gaming history who thinks the above pointers are a recepie for success for shooters in 2026 (excluding Wildlight employees who thinks it's a good game and gamers know nothing, and Geoff Keighley being master salesman).

Given how the game released, there's probably some Early Access alpha mode games that are more fleshed out. Crazy.

Whichever bank or investor group dolled out the money to fund this game got majorly hosed with sloppy unfinished work.
 
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"This is lightning in a bottle."
"I trust this team wholeheartedly."
"If there's one project nobody in the industry is worried will fail, it's yours."
"This has mainstream hit written all over it."
"There's no way this will flop."
"I could play this game all day."

Eradicating masculinity from the industry was a mistake. This environment of toxic feminine positivity is not good for the devs in the long run, not good for the product and not good for the player.

The first time they hear that what they made is actually not 'lightning in a bottle' like they kept telling each other, but is in fact trash, should not be when it reaches players. The cognitive dissonance is too much for them to handle, and they will desperately search for any other explanation which allows them to hold on to the collaborative delusion they constructed for themselves while working on the game.

Not only does this environment lead to games not reaching their potential, but it psychologically prevents those involved from learning and improving in the future. There is no reason to think about how to improve if they have convinced each other that what they made was already perfect and it was everyone else's fault it failed.
 
vindafarna said:
It sounds like the studio's morale was toast after the justified poor reception of its reveal.
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If they told gamers earlier what the game was all about with detailed videos or a beta test, most of the issues people complained about would had been fixed by launch. It'd still be a bland game missing content, but at least some gameplay and tech issues would be resolved.

In only about a week and a half they did fix a lot of issues with patches. So it shows they got the manpower and mental mindset to fix things fast when needed.

But the studio had a wild view that their game was ready for the masses as a shadow drop because it was so good. Not technically a shadow drop since Keighley showed their crappy trailer 6 weeks ahead. But close enough given they didnt even tell gamers more about it till launch.

The next time these devs put together another studio to make another shooter, I wonder if game #3 will be shadow drop too. lol
 
He's got a point. People do like to pile on. Hating on stuff does drive engagement. I'm sure that was one of the factors involved.

It's not a good look to say that out loud, though. You just come off as blaming.
 
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100k people on Steam alone tried the game out. Probably a lot more on PS5 too. That's a better chance than most games ever get. The people tried it and didn't like it.
 
Kikorin said:
The only thing I agree on is that negative content and drama have a lot more traction online than positive ones, so creators are a lot more inclined to generate drama.

Said that, if the game was any good, it would had chance to redime itself when released, but instead it confirmed all the negativity around it.
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I mean, yeah. GAF was there the second this got announced because it was mad unimpressed this was the one more thing by Geoff.

That is really what set it off. You have to wonder if the devs are to blame for it (I don't think so). Having said that, although the game is no Concord, it looks like everything else out there. It looks like a better Immortals of Aveum.

But the real biggest issue with Highguard is that it doesn't do anything new. Its a game using oversaturated concepts. If even people from outside the studio can't tell you that, then perhaps you aren't really reading into what players actually want.

So TLDR:
I agree that the timing and ensuing negativity didn't help. But that's gamers for ya. They really don't care about your daily developing grind. Yeah i wish that was different. But it is not. So there you are.

However, they dropped the ball coming up with a shooter that's been done to death already. The GaaS hero shooter is today's zombie MMO.
 
You had almost 100k concurrent players on your launch day. You lost almost all of them in less than two weeks.
If so many people give your game a chance and you fail to retain them, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Your game is crap.
 
Everytime a bad videogame fails
Devs :
angry star wars GIF by Hyper RPG

Gamers :
Bill Paxton Smile GIF by GritTV
 
When are developers going to learn that most people don't want Overwatch clone 2.0? I'm starting to feel the same way about these souls like looking action adventure games. They all look the fucking same.
 
That's why companies tell their employees dont do or say anything stupid online. Youd think game companies are no different and execs and HR tell them dont do it. And just to make sure here's some online code of conduct modules to flip through. Go through the slides and see what Stupid Sally should say or dont say.

But leave it to gaming employees to always make themselves and the company look dumb. If you look at his experience, he's a character FX/animator artist. Guy knows nothing about the business side of stuff. So that's why companies dont want random employees saying dumb things to the public because many are nuts, whiney and will say things they dont understand. Its not a hard guideline to follow, but some people (often with social media being a giant part of their lives linking work and home life) have to tell the world what they think as if they are a patient and everyone in the world is their psychologist knowing about the daily lives.

Imagine a guy making $20/hr working the mail room dropping off packages at people's desks and ordering supplies from Staples. And this guy at your company goes on social media trying to represent the company with his work issues and rags on customers.

But in a way they are doing their job. It's entertainment end of day. It's just that the laughs dont come from the game itself, but from their miserable lives.

It's too bad HG and Wildlight are on its last legs anyway so it doesnt really matter. The guy is going to be one of the people already fired. And like Concord, the shitty game and wacky employees online will be forgotten. It would had been better if the game/studio were on better footing so the company would have to endure this dev's tweet for years as a dark cloud.
 
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Social media has been steadily ruining basic facets of human interaction since it started. It is getting worse. Studies are showing that cognitive function in students is at the lowest its ever been, it's getting worse, and this trend started when digital learning and technology became prominent.

Reaction culture is laughable to people with intellect, but the unwashed masses lap it up and the mainstream is the stream. so here we are sadly.
 
Joe Cool Joe Cool No need to muddy watters with that corporate mumbo jumbo statement.
Facts are: devteam fucked up majorly, their game flopped, they got laid off coz customers(and 95% of audience for this genre are teenage boys/young adult males, which devs should be aware of) decided game is shit.
No amount of blaming mainstream/social media/god himself will change delusional take that developer had.

Who decides on how game gonna be- dev team(maybe publisher too), not players, we can only judge at launch if game is worthy our hard earned money or even more precious- our time, this game was not worth any of it, hence the flop.
Case closed- other devs got 2 choices here, either learn from grave mistake of other devteams or just follow same path to destruction(like guerrilla did).
 
Many people, including myself, fucking GROANED at the end of The Game Awards when Highguard showed up. I was expecting something groundbreaking or something that would have been a great surprise, not....this shit. Not another fucking hero shooter in an oversaturated market of them. What a way to close out the awards show with this shit. Another fucking hero shooter that no one asked for. How many of them have bit the dust now?

  • Battleborn
  • Concord
  • Highguard
  • Lawbreakers (immediately got overshadowed by Overwatch)
  • Xdefiant
 
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Weekend spike not even moving the needle. The peak lows in the middle of the night are bumped up maybe 200 CCU. The peak daily highs are about flat vs Thurs/Fri. And still much lower than earlier in the week.

Currently at 2,000 CCU ranked #479 sandwiched between RE4 (2005) and a anime looking game called Blue Archive.

It's just above something called Fallout New Vegas PCR. Clicked on the Store button and got a blank listing. Googled it, and this is a Polish-Czech region version of the game. This game is actually trending up lately and passes Highguard on the daily peak stat. So there's more people playing FNV in those countries than Highguard globabally. lol
 
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TonberrysKnife said:
Many people, including myself, fucking GROANED at the end of The Game Awards when Highguard showed up. Not another fucking hero shooter in an oversaturated market of them. What a way to close out the awards show with this shit.
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For me, I dont play hero shooters so who knows which ones catch fire and dont. But just at first glance where it showed machine guns + horses + magic powers + getting Excalibur from a rock I knew it was something stupid jamming everything into it.

And at that time, nobody even knew it was worse with 3 vs 3 teams on giant maps, had blue gem mining, or had chest looting.

If the game was more fleshed out (including more modes), had much bigger teams and was focused on killing and S&D maybe it'd work better. It would resemble the Keighley trailer more as a constant action packed shooter and bomb planting game (like youre usual COD mode). But the real game was far from the truth.

Whichever people at Wildlight put together that trailer totally screwed over people's expectations with a wildly (no pun intended) misleading trailer.
 
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StreetsofBeige said:
where it showed machine guns + horses + magic powers + getting Excalibur from a rock I knew it was something stupid jamming everything into it.
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Truly it was the passion project to mash in all setting tropes and then have mining in a hero shooter in the year of our lord 2026.

Yep.

Passion project that the team dreamed to do for years.

God, I love internet spin when it comes to shit that flops.
 
Plague Doctor said:
Truly it was the passion project to mash in all setting tropes and then have mining in a hero shooter in the year of our lord 2026.

Yep.

Passion project that the team dreamed to do for years.

God, I love internet spin when it comes to shit that flops.
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Passion Project.

I guarantee you that's not a term you'll ever hear a studio grifting for money to say to an investor group. I'm sure the average investment company has tons of money to float any bombs, but lets face it. They got ripped off on this one. Not even close. I bet whichever guy ultimately picked to back HG (not necessarily the CEO's idea) gets ribbed at work for Concord 2.0. Nice pick buddy! lol
 
StreetsofBeige said:
Passion Project.

I guarantee you that's not a term you'll ever hear a studio grifting for money to say to an investor group. I'm sure the average investment company has tons of money to float any bombs, but lets face it. They got ripped off on this one. Not even close. I bet whichever guy ultimately picked to back HG (not necessarily the CEO's idea) gets ribbed at work for Concord 2.0. Nice pick buddy! lol
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Oh yeah. Totally. When they spoke to investors, it's clear the pitch was "Yes! All the things! And Live service"

I am just laughing at the spin I have heard elsewhere on the net that tries to invoke sympathy that this was this dev's passion project when they broke away from their previous employers.

Yep, this totally isn't the weird amalgamation of buzz words to secure investment money.
 
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Plague Doctor said:
Oh yeah. Totally. When they spoke to investors, it's clear the pitch was "Yes! All the things! And Live service"

I am just laughing at the spin I have heard elsewhere on the net that tries to invoke sympathy that this was this dev's passion project when they broke away from their previous employers.

Yep, this totally isn't the weird conglomeration of buzz words to secure investment money.
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LOL. Lucky for any of these people, they got paid for years wasting gamers time and funder's money. They'll just rotate to the next grifty project which has a good chance of wasting everyone's time again.

If anyone want to take a job for sake of a passion project go ahead. Just be ready for passion project employment and success because most people in the world dont have the same passion for the same thing.
 
ChorizoPicozo said:


Aztecross: "even the toxic ones have money, you need to treat everyone as a potential costumer"

Jurnos, sweet baby incs and DEI devs:
crushed noo GIF
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These are the kind of dipshits unironically in positions of power dude:

nWFYgJJevUR164X1.jpeg


"Wrong people" aka anyone not a drooling Twitter slactivist like Jade King (who's a guy pretending to be a woman btw) bitching about CI Games being the literal sole Western AA game developer to promise to make sure you can tell the difference between the males and females in their games. You don't activists enough. You think you do, but you don't.
 
StreetsofBeige said:
Picked 3-6 months. Need HG servers to last 70 more days!

I think there's a better chance of rolling boxcars 10 times in a row.
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I also chose 3 months. I'm by no means an expert on MP games (last MP game I was truly invested in was fucking Halo: Reach back in 2010) but I can only assume that losing 90% of both their playerbase, the majority of their staff, and if they can't have constant roadmap content that brings in a SUBSTANTIAL new playerbase:
Its Over GIF
 
PeteBull said:
Joe Cool Joe Cool No need to muddy watters with that corporate mumbo jumbo statement.
Facts are: devteam fucked up majorly, their game flopped, they got laid off coz customers(and 95% of audience for this genre are teenage boys/young adult males, which devs should be aware of) decided game is shit.
No amount of blaming mainstream/social media/god himself will change delusional take that developer had.

Who decides on how game gonna be- dev team(maybe publisher too), not players, we can only judge at launch if game is worthy our hard earned money or even more precious- our time, this game was not worth any of it, hence the flop.
Case closed- other devs got 2 choices here, either learn from grave mistake of other devteams or just follow same path to destruction(like guerrilla did).
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It really is borderline true insanity that devs aren't targeting the majority audience with these GAAS. They need leaders with the backbones to tell the weirdos and "intellectuals" to STFU and either quit or get on board with actually making money.
 
Angry_Megalodon said:
This is why these hacks don't deserve any sympathy. Fuck them, the media and also the dumb investors who threw their money into this pile of shit.
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For any of these shitty games, just think of all of them who were on the job FT for 5 years from beginning to end. Pending their role and salary some pulled in a solid $1M+ to make junk.

Rinse and repeat. Most will find another job. Heck, Wildlight even hired some Concord devs to come on over. So even working on the biggest trainwreck in gaming history doesnt seem too much of a problem to get rehired.

Gaming seems like one of those cozy industries where people just rotate studios and it makes zero difference if the game was good or not.
 
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in my mind the two games that didn't does not deserve the low number/ didn't deserve to get shut down
X defiant and Rumble verse
 
Content creators probably didn't help, but I'm tempted to say that if there wasn't a negative reception to the game there would have simply been... no reception. Either this was gonna die quietly in a back-alley on steam or loudly on center stage at Geoff's circus.
 
ViciousAgenda said:
Launching without extensive play testing is a huge mistake.
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According to the twitter from the dev, it was tested, and all the bad feedback was fixable. I would say this is a classic: Toxicity Positivity.
Happens all over the place, you can find this by just going into Veilguard or even Bloodlines 2 subreddit.

For me its hilarious how Deadlock characters have more personality than all of these crap we're getting.
 
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Rubim said:
According to the twitter from the dev, it was tested, and all the bad feedback was fixable. I would say this is a classic: Toxicity Positivity.
Happens all over the place, you can find this by just going into Veilguard or even Bloodlines 2 subreddit.

For me its hilarious how Deadlock characters have more personality than all of these crap we're getting.
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Valve can playing long with infinite money maker + icefrog involvement probablt magnum opus his creation next gen moba
 
Ass of Can Whooping said:
How many more of these flops do we need before these retards learn lmao
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I can imagine these game managers meeting at expos and battling it out over who will be the next Fortnite and sleep on a bed of money

eye-contact-key-and-peele.gif


Maybe the genre is not saturated? Maybe we have a chance at Fortnite money/success??

Let's try like all the other ones

Animated GIF


It'll be different than the other dead corpses


WXLLvv.gif
 
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