Highguard and the curse of the hero shooter
Hero shooters used to be one of the hottest ideas in multiplayer gaming. Then a flood of similar games and some high profile failures made a lot of players instantly roll their eyes at any new entry in the genre. Highguard has just crashed head first into that wall.
Highguard was revealed as the final big announcement at last year’s Game Awards, a slot usually reserved for something massive and unexpected. Think of reveals like Monster Hunter Wilds or even the Matrix Unreal Engine 5 tech demo and trailer combo. People tune in for jaw dropping moments, and expectations are sky high.
Instead, the show closed on Highguard, a new PVP hero shooter. The reaction was almost immediate and overwhelmingly negative. The trailer quickly pulled in thousands of YouTube dislikes versus only a few hundred likes. Commenters piled on, calling it yet another generic hero shooter and comparing it directly to Concord, Sony’s recent live service shooter that launched, flopped, and vanished in record time.
That context matters. After years of live service games failing to stick and players burning out on battle passes and repetitive grinds, a lot of PC gamers are suspicious of any new online shooter that looks the slightest bit familiar. By the time Highguard’s trailer ended, it was not just a new game, it had become a symbol of everything people are tired of in the genre.
The twist: that Game Awards slot was not even paid
Many viewers assumed Highguard’s team had paid a fortune to hijack the finale slot of the Game Awards. Reports were floating around about developers dropping six figure sums just to secure a 60 second trailer somewhere in the show, so it was easy to imagine that the last slot cost even more.
But a report from Forbes revealed a very different story. According to their coverage, Highguard’s developers did not pay for that finale position at all. Showrunner Geoff Keighley apparently just really liked the game and offered them the prime slot for free.
On paper, that sounds like a dream deal. Free exposure, during the most watched moment of one of gaming’s biggest marketing events, backed by the personal enthusiasm of the host. In practice, it backfired hard.
Because that final reveal was framed as the big one more thing moment, expectations were pushed to the stratosphere. Players were hoping for something wildly new, a major sequel, or a jaw dropping technical showcase. Instead they saw a trailer for a game that, at least at first glance, looked like a fairly standard hero shooter with a muted style and familiar structure.
Even writers who were not impressed by the trailer pointed out that Highguard does not look awful. It just looks common. In a world overflowing with multiplayer shooters chasing the same audience, that is enough to doom a game in the court of public opinion before anyone has even touched a mouse.
So what should have been a massive marketing boost turned into an anchor. Highguard is no longer just another hero shooter trying to stand out. It is that hero shooter, the one that closed the Game Awards and got buried under a wave of dislikes and memes.
Why gamers love to pile on new releases
Highguard’s situation highlights a bigger pattern in modern gaming culture. Every few months, a new target appears and the internet seems eager to tear it down before anyone has time to form a balanced opinion. It is not limited to unknown games either. Recent titles like Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Star Wars Outlaws have taken heavy criticism long before release, sometimes for valid concerns, sometimes because outrage and dunking are just part of the online cycle now.
Memetic hate spreads fast. One trailer clip is clipped or quoted, someone makes a sharp joke on social media, a YouTube dislike ratio starts to spiral, and suddenly the community decides a game is doomed. Once that narrative takes over, it is incredibly hard for a studio to change minds, no matter how much work goes into the actual gameplay, balance, or performance later on.
That does not mean players are wrong to be skeptical. PC gamers have been burned by buggy launches, abandoned live service titles, aggressive monetization, and clones that feel like they exist only to chase trends. A lot of the frustration around yet another PVP hero shooter comes from that history. People remember investing time and sometimes money into games that were shut down within a year or two. Concord’s extremely short lifespan is a fresh example of how quickly a live service shooter can arrive and disappear.
But Highguard shows what happens when that frustration turns into a reflex. The trailer might be uninspiring, but there is a difference between saying this looks generic and preloading months of hostility toward a team that has not even shipped yet. The result is a game that now has to claw its way out of a hole dug largely by expectation and internet mood, not by any directly experienced failure.
For PC players, it is worth stepping back and remembering that trailers are only a slice of the story. Some games with weak early marketing quietly turn into cult classics once people actually get hands on and word of mouth spreads. Others look incredible in trailers and then ship with poor optimization, shallow systems, or aggressive monetization.
Highguard still has to prove itself on core things PC gamers actually care about: responsive gunplay, solid netcode, smart map design, fair progression, and performance that does not tank your frame rate. Until we see those details, all we really know is that a free marketing opportunity collided with a tired audience, and the result was a storm that probably no new hero shooter could have weathered gracefully.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/hero-shooter-highguard-reportedly-didnt-even-pay-for-the-game-awards-slot-thats-earned-it-so-much-preemptive-hate-the-showrunners-thought-it-deserved-the-spotlight/
