Highguard has an art style that is primarily concerned with selling cosmetics instead of delivering a hopefully unique vision.
Highguard, Finals, and many more have this “everything goes” therefore nothing matters style.
It’s a call sign, that Deadlocks beta-design on old heroes has more vision.
It although shows, that hero shooters are not at the end possibilities.
I feel like 75% of the hate for this game is literally just because they had a trailer at the end of the game awards that nobody liked. I kinda feel bad for the devs. The game isn’t amazing, but it doesn’t deserve this much hate.
I mean, it’s another FtP PvP base defense shooter. Like we were running short of Team Fortress clones any time in the last ten years.
I do sometimes get the sense that when a marketing team can’t gin up artificial enthusiasm, they settle on “controversy” as an attention grabbing strategy. Getting legions of digital skanks to declare a mid-game The Worst Thing Ever at least keeps the title on the radar, rather than falling into obscurity.
Honestly, I’m not even clear how you can spend nine figures on a game when its a copy of a copy of a copy. “We reskinned Tribes again, then dropped a full scale motion picture’s budget on the fucking trailer” seems to be how AAA titles get sold these days. No wonder everyone in the industry is so excited about AI.
That and engagement bait.
I was always grossed/weirded out at all the social media presence wanting this game to fail. I agree it seems to suck out of the gate, but I’m never happy about it. The world needs more good games.
The suspicion I have with 3v3 is they know it feels empty, but had little choice due to performance issues, since effects/CPU usage scale with the number of players. If they keep optimizing, maybe someday we see 12v12 as our Heavy, Engineer, and Pyro gods intended?
I’m grossed/weirded out by yet another micro transaction riddled “live service” masquerading as an indie passion project. They even did a disgusting little media tour citing how they want their particular web of sub-nested premium currencies to be particularly ethical, and not charge more than $20 for their awful cosmetics.
The world needs more good games. The world does not need more soulless cash grabs
The world needs more good games.
Does it? I feel like we’re flush. My Steam queue already has a dozen more games than I’d ever have time to play.
Of course it does. Art is the medium through which we process and communicate our most complicated emotions. As the world continues to change, more and more art will have the power to affect us positively
Art is the medium through which we process and communicate our most complicated emotions.
Listen, I’m not saying we don’t need the odd new DeltaRune or Blue Prince. But the sheer volume of new mass market games seems to have eclipsed the real overall demand some time ago.
If you’re constantly obsessed with the New Title, you lose sight of the vintage classics. You never have a chance to pick up an old Atari game from the 70s or try some SNES banger from the 90s or even a PS3 classic from the 10s if you’ve glued yourself to the New Releases queue.
Maybe people have emotions worth communing with that are more than a year old.
The lesson should have been learned when Lawbreakers died: you can’t release a game that is just “good” into a saturated ecosystem and expect it to succeed. When a game has to compete with six others in the same genre, especially deeply enfranchised titles like Apex or Forkknife, it must be exceptional. Highguard falls well short of that. It’s the most average, design-by-committee, risk-averse, trend chasing, white bread, picket fence product I’ve played in a long time. It’s a glass of lukewarm tap water. It’s unsalted butter on toast. And that’s before Keighley and studio management fucked up its marketing.
If a game has to fail in order for some management type to finally engage that lump of tapioca pudding inside their cranium and let the game system designers create a better game, I won’t shed a tear for it. And if this is what the studio made up of alleged “industry veterans” can achieve, I won’t shed a tear for it either. We need better games, not more of them.
If the world needs more good games, they should have designed it to last rather than inevitably shutting down in under two years if it doesn’t take off.
I agree, and the performance thing was my suspicion as well. It just seems off to have a large scale siege game be so small.
To be honest 5v5 still seems kinda small on paper to me, but I haven’t played it.
The focus on player dropoff is always misleading. Free to play games always lose massive numbers of players within the first week generally. What matters is who’s left, and what the company’s operating budget is. 10k players or even less can be plenty for a small team for instance. With such small player team sizes in-game, that would also be more than enough for a populated feeling queue.
Do any of the studios actually playtest their shit, or do they just make their games based on marketing buzzwords so investors remain happy?
