Highguard was one of the most decisive game announcements from last year’s Game Awards that failed to capture the heart of a live-service audience base. It had some of the greatest minds behind games such as Apex Legends working on it, and was vehemently backed by Geoff Keighley.
Unfortunately, the game’s weird marketing found itself at the wrong time, especially when most of the gaming industry was getting saturated with live service shooters. Thus, on release, it was barely given a chance by players.
Currently, the game sits at a very low player count, hitting almost double digits. But one of the devs thinks that there is a good reason behind why this is happening. According to the game’s senior-level designer, Alex Graner, on a podcast, “the game was too sweaty.”
Highguard was created for the Competitive scene
According to Alex, the game in its design phase was heavily leaning towards creating something that is made solely for the competitive scene, and it eventually turned into one of his “biggest fears as a player.”
“3v3 duos is always the sweatiest version of anything like battle royale,” according to Alex, and the fact that the game had every other objective rules based under the sun, based around a large open space, made matches impossible if the opponent had strong communication with teammates.
For a game that was just crawling into its infancy, it should have expected completely new and interested players stepping into it for fun. Unfortunately, they got bombarded by what seemed like a game that is built for cutthroat PvP with high skill movement.
“‘Oh, you want to loot, now we’ve got to chase this objective, now we have to plant this objective, now it’s overtime. It has all these rules, which I think work at a really high level, but when players are first coming in, it’s a lot to grasp.” Said Alex Garner.
The industry is saturated with the live-service model
Highguard already had a lot to deal with on its plate due to the frame one animosity which it received after the mis-timed marketing at the Game Awards. It had earned itself the notorious reputation of being called Concord 2, after everyone started comparing it with PlayStation’s failed attempt at a live-service shooter.
Some held out hopes that the rug would not get pulled, but unfortunately, just days into the game’s release, we learned that Wildlight Entertainment is letting go of most of its staff. The game is currently at a suspended state of development with just a few people working behind it, which will probably not be for long since Tencent is supposed to have stopped funding it.
Alex is not the only developer who has come forward to discuss the game’s ill-fated situation. Recently, Josh Shoel, who was a technical artist behind the game, took to social media to talk about how the game never got a chance to begin with due to gamers being hell-bent on making fun of it.
The game may not be completely dead yet, but the signs around it are very telling of how it is currently on life support. Maybe this will finally be a telling sign for the industry that is adamant on making live-service shooters, that their consumers are tired of the genre.
