"We were turned into a joke from minute one, largely due to false assumptions about a million-dollar ad placement, which even prominent journalists soon began to state as fact. Within minutes, it was decided: this game was dead on arrival, and creators now had free ragebait content for a month. Every one of our videos on social media got downvoted to hell. Comments sections were flooded with copy/paste meme phrases such as 'Concord 2' and 'Titanfall 3 died for this.' At launch, we received over 14k review bombs from users with less than an hour of playtime. Many didn't even finish the required tutorial."
The bitterness in Sobel's message is impossible to overlook, and fair enough: His wounds are still fresh, and I don't think there's any question that many of the reactions to the Highguard reveal were hyperbolic beyond all reason. But his emphasis on the universally positive pre-release feedback, reflected in statements from observers like
'There's no way this will flop' and
'This has mainstream hit written all over it,' suggests to me that more dispassionate and critical eyes throughout the development process were sorely needed: Live service games can and do flop, more often than not.
It's easy (and maybe even tempting) to say the haters won out, but more thoughtful critics, including our own Morgan Park, found Highguard to be a perfectly fine but far from remarkable experience: As Morgan wrote in his
65% review, "It takes the chaotic spirit of Rust or Minecraft Bed Wars and sands it down until it's frictionless and bland."
I don't like seeing games fail (and to be clear, Highguard is still around—Wildlight said a "core group of developers [will] continue innovating on and supporting the game") but the reality is that Highguard pulled in hundreds of thousands of players and Twitch viewers when it launched in January—they just chose not to stick around.
"It's the CHUDS' FAULT the game failed!" Fuck off retard.
