Gaming: It's Hard To Fault Highguard For Giving The Internet The Silent...
After the free-to-play shooter's Game Awards reveal was roundly mocked, the creators opted not to engage. Can't blame 'em!
Few actually expected last year's Game Awards to close with anything as earth-shattering as Half-Life 3, but if that kind of huge announcement were going to happen during the show, that's when it would. Instead, Geoff Keighley cued up a trailer for an unknown hero shooter called Highguard. It didn't go great.
The social media reaction was instantly hostile. Highguard was received as a 'one more thing' trespasser that had claimed an unearned seat of honor, although its developer did not pay for the slot as many assumed. The reveal has become a case study in how not to announce a game, but what really got people worked up is what Highguard's developer did next: nothing.
Highguard is launching on Steam next week, but the studio still hasn't said anything new about it publicly, aside from a tweet today announcing a livestream. Starved for a new trailer to dunk on in the endless competition to win the social media Cynicism Cup, posters have had to settle for generic declarations of Highguard's cookedness.
That cynicism-for-cynicism's-sake aside, it feels safe to say that general distrust of this kind of game is at an all-time high. In Highguard's case, you do get a whiff of hubris from the decision not to run any public betas. We've just seen Bungie, a studio with quite a bit of experience releasing multiplayer shooters, take feedback from a Marathon playtest and slowly, cautiously start to turn public perception around on it. But Highguard's just going to drop? You've gotta raise an eyebrow at that.
I can't fault Highguard's creators for not being actively engaged internet piñatas, though. The implication of so many X posts and YouTube video titles is that it's bizarre, catastrophic, and scandalous that we have not been showered with character trailers, deep dive articles, and developer quotes. The quietude is a little unusual, but lots of games don't get all that, especially self-published games like Highguard.
And some Highguard developers did in fact post on social media after the announcement, with one of them subsequently saying: "Day 1 of being a game dev with a public-facing game and I got 75+ quote retweets personally ripping me apart, simply for being excited to share what I poured myself into for years."
With that kind of response, they may as well just let the game speak for itself. It's not as if there's any actual scand
