Highguard - Concord 2.0?

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WULULULULU said:
Counter-Strike outlives another one. (26 years+)
EVE Online outlives another one. (23 years+)
Team Fortress 2 outlives another one. (18 years+)
World of Tanks outlives another one. (16 years+)
War Thunder outlives another one. (14 years+)
PAYDAY 2 outlives another one. (13 years+)
DOTA 2 outlives another one. (12 years+)
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And even Warframe
 
Thiletonomics said:
Design Director Jason McCord posted this executive AF statement about the game on his LinkedIn:

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If he claimed to have learned more from this failure than the previous 7 successful games, then he clearly didn't learn a thing from the first 7 as to what makes a game successful.

And the "we love to play" sentence is yet another example of developers being delusional and living in their own circlejerks.
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If there were any common sense in the industry, this monumental failure would never lead a project again. Yet he's confidently talking about the future. Yeah, no motherfucker. How about you scrub toilets (and I don't mean any disrespect to janitors and housecleaners, who actually are productive members of society and probably better at game design than this loser).
 
Kuritan Deplorable said:
McDonalds has around 150,000 for 40,000 stores. That's almost 4x the corporate overhead per location, in corporate salaries. Its actually worse than it looks since that level of scale involves much more upper strata middle management, so their cost for that overhead is going to be higher as well, with far more people in the director and VP salary bands.
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Ah, I see. They're bleeding money paying out kings ransoms to an army of middle managers. The kind of people who make their living going to meetings where they schedule meetings to discuss how they'll organize more meetings.

I thought you must have have been wrong about the development cost and the burger only being temporary but all of that shit was true and I'm stunnlocked. Somewhere they always suck more than you remember.
 
I think I'd prefer to have Concordverse Megathread instead, I get confused running between Highguard and Marathon ones, might as well be the same thing lmao
Gas18697 said:
they went bust twice but china money safed them twice. that company would have been gone year ago. but they kept sucking on china cocks
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I never heard of this. Where does that come from?
They did sell out to China long ago, like most of Canada it seems, but they still retain creative control and last I heard they were quite profitable.
 
Those retards could immediately redeem themselves if they released the game code, but they would never dare do that.
 
Slimpacks said:
It's over. Highguard will shut down on March 12th
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Link | Archive
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WHY WEREN'T THOSE FEATURES IN THE BASE GAME TO BEGIN WITH!? WHY ARE THEY SURPRISED IT FUCKING FLOPPED?! What a bunch of FUCKING RETARDS!!!
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Probably the only studio I didn't wish this to, but they kinda asked for it. I was already tired of hero shooters by the time Valorant came out. (Fuck Valorant BTW, hope the servers shut down soon)

Also unpopular opinion, but it's nothing like Concord... other than the fact it flopped, but whatever. Trust me, Concord is uniquely shitty.
 
WULULULULU said:
Isn't Trump doing something about Tencent? IIRC he is contacting the US rep of Tencent or something.
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I'm sure there are actions being taken behind the scenes, it goes without saying that there is no such thing as private commercial independence for a Chinese company, there are card-holding members of the CCP embedded into the corporate structure of all their big companies. Having a company like Tencent being partial owners of American companies like Epic and all the data, influence and revenue that this brings to the Chinese government is always going to be a concern.
 
Forgotten Beast said:
I again wonder if this is because other teams are less prone to dramatic outbursts
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I know some people who did gamedev and they avoid social media because they don't think it's worth their time to get into arguments with strangers; on the other hand, they are a different breed of insufferable.
 
The Grand Miser said:
Like others, I also don't believe it was Geoff Keighley's fault the game died. That failure was entirely Highguard's own fault.
However, I still think Geoff's role in the game's fate is extremely important for cementing it as Concord 2. Without him shining a giant spotlight on this game, nobody would have played it, nobody would have heard of it, and it would have gone like a fart in the wind like many LS fails.
Look for example at Killer Inn, a game that launched less than a month ago and never broke 1k concurrent players, and will undoubtedly arrive at EoS soon. That would have been Highguard's fate if not for Geoff. It's only thanks to him that Highguard could truly become Concord's sequel.
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Square Enix has lost its way. It’s been releasing crap most of the time and I knew Killer Inn would be something nobody would be interested in.

failed mist said:
Even Concord had a distinct, consistent visual style, with its insulated spacesuit looks. Ofc this had no mass appeal or sex appeal but they DID try to do something unique.
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And it was ugly and confused like Highguard. Whoever came up with the intestine aesthetic was on crack.
 
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Soyjak Enjoyer said:
Haven't played it in a week, don't plan on playing it again
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Dusted it off for the first time in a month and hit the slop mines one more time (maybe I'll boot again to witness the actual server closing) to see the final patch (and a few other patches they added in the meantime). Here's a fairly comprehensive overview of what they added and what post-decay highguard looks like.

The queue times are proper atrocious now, like 5-10 minutes for quickplay and matchmaking is nonexistant as a result, like you see 20 kill gaps on the same team. The time to load into a match was way longer too, like I couldn't even pick a character before I loaded in half of the time, and it wasn't like that before. At least the few players left are mostly pretty decent at the game so I'm not getting throws from retarded teammates every other match anymore.

The werewolf guy is pretty lame, he turns into a wolf instead of riding a mount, which controls similar but disables the gun while using it which is lame. And his abilities are just lame recon stuff. The ult is unavoidable recon which is annoying to play against.

The other new guy Kolvo is a bit better. He has some tools for reviving teammates easier, and his ult is pretty meh, but his main thing is he can hold up a shield that tanks about half a clip of damage, It's good for a panic button or peaking or playing with a teammate. He's probably my 2nd or 3rd favorite overall, which is really an indictment of the game when just a shield makes you more interesting the 75% of the roster, but unironically there are only 3 characters in the game where the abilities actually affect your playstyle the rest just have some free value button that you pop either before every fight, at the start of every fight, or every time you're about to die.

There's a new shotgun, I didn't like the feel of it. There's a new tool where it's a gun the opens locks, it seemed kind of useless since the other raid tools can just destroy the doors permanently. I guess it's a bit more discrete and locks enemies out of their own doors, but the latter seems impractical in a real match. Some new maps and bases too, but you don't really feel the impact of that given the artstyle is lame and nobody is invested enough to care about the geometry. Patch notes also mentioned some limited time mode where it was just raids nothing else, but that was already closed out I assume because queues are fucked

The skill trees are I guess the big feature, and it's pretty bizarre how you can unlock an advantage over players before even starting a match given how everything else about this game seemed like it was trying to be a super serious esport. My only guess is they intended to be something everyone maxes out quickly (since it's shutting down they tuned it so you can max it in like 15-20 matches) and then it's more a matter of what you spec into. They designed it so none of the upgrades directly make your gun stronger in battle so its all based on secondary mechanics like wall destruction, chest spawns, fall damage, spawn locations, revives, currency, etc. Some of it feels pretty pointless like giving you more of a resource that you already have an overabundance of, but even some of the smaller things like less fall damage it's nice being able to jump down the third floor of your base to shotgun a guy on the ground. The main draw of the system seems to be that it makes the looting phase less tedious, like having a quick mine without playing the stupid minigame, and like why is this a thing you need to unlock it just shouldn't be there to begin with

They made a few changes to the general format. They made the looting phase shorter and more likely to funnel players into combat. They made it that you can only destroy 1 generator per raid making the matches less one sided and giving more of a reason to go for the super generator that instantly wins the match. These changes specifically are real improvements that genuinely make the game better. Just makes it all the more baffling that nobody caught these obvious issues before it released to a swarm of 100k prospective players.

I'm not saying if they released with the current patch of the game it would've faired any better, but if they waited like another year to release and improved the game at this pace while also not fucking up on a few other major things like the artstyle, then maybe it could've been a mild success. I guess the CCP money ran out at a bad time, maybe they should've been wiser with the CCP money and not have hired 100 fucking people

final verdict is a weak 6 out of 10. I enjoyed it more than Marathon
 
I hate this notion that we have to be sorry for these people losing their jobs. This isn’t a big publisher randomly shutting down a studio that was doing well, this isn’t a recession making their job unviable, this is bad people making a bad product and expecting to be entitled to money.
Frankly half of all game devs need to lose their job and never work in games again, and maybe then we’ll get good games. The people are definitely the problem.

And make no mistake, these people would not care one bit if you lost your job because you don’t agree with them on trivial issues.
 
And Chad Grenier posted another statement on the game on his LinkedIn: / Archive

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With the announcement of Highguard shutting down, I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on the last four and a half years.

Highguard was an ambitious project from the start. We set out to build something new in the shooter space and took a real swing in a very competitive market. Highguard didn’t need to become the next Apex-sized hit to succeed. We weren’t chasing that scale. What we needed was a smaller but stable and sustainable player base, and ultimately we weren’t able to find it.

This was the 8th game I’ve built and shipped in my career, and the first that hasn’t become a hit. While it's unrealistic to think you can go 8-0, it's still a tough outcome to swallow. If you spend long enough building games you learn our industry is full of uncertainty.

Sometimes the biggest challenge is trying to hit a moving target. When you take investment under certain criteria and lock in a high-level vision 4.5 years before release, the market you launch into can look very different from the one you started building for. Trends shift, player expectations evolve, and there are many investor realities behind the scenes that the public will never fully see.

What I’m most proud of from this journey isn’t just the game. It’s the team and culture we built along the way. From the beginning, I tried to build a place where talented developers wanted to work. Where people were treated with respect, had autonomy, where employees came first, and where success would be shared across the entire team, not just leadership. I made many personal sacrifices for the company and the team because I believed deeply in what we were trying to build together. Unfortunately, we never got the opportunity to see the upside of that success play out.

I’m also incredibly proud of the team for pushing through the waves of negativity that often come with launching something on the internet today. Game developers pour years of their lives into creating something that is a form of art. It’s okay if something isn’t for you, not every game needs to be for every player. But the people behind these projects care deeply about what they create, and the team showed professionalism and resilience in the face of and environment full of hate. When people hated, we gave each other love and support.

To the more than 2 million players who jumped in to try Highguard, and especially those who stuck with us and supported the game, thank you. It meant a lot to the team.

While this outcome isn’t the one we hoped for, I leave this experience with a tremendous number of lessons that will stay with me for the rest of my career. And despite everything, I’m incredibly proud of the team and what we built together.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that building games (and running a studio) requires humility and persistence. Not every swing connects, but the only way this industry moves forward is by people continuing to take them.
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Ambitious project? Humility and persistence? Analogies like trying to hit a moving target? Making a barebones game from massively outsourced work, and designing heroes in only 2-3 weeks per character is not any of those executive buzzwords.
 
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