Highguard - Concord 2.0?

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Option A: Play Project Zomboid, driving a shitbox Pickup screaming down Dixie Highway and running over [urban youth] zombies while hollaring "GIT OWDAH 'ERE NICKUR" as your friend in the passenger seat is chambering rounds into his pumpy.

Option B: Play HighGuard. Where you can farm diamonds in your shooter while riding your horse in an empty map.


timesChange.mp4
Don't make remember how hype I was for Warlords of Dreanor, which at least tonally is baffling to admit that it is 1000% better than the shit they are making now.

Got DAMN WoW drilled to the core of the earth in terms of that.
 
It's hilarious how so many of these dog water games are being made and they are all so similar that they created a new genre of games. What would be a good name for this new genre? Concordian? Concord-like?
 
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It's telling that the guys who made the game have no idea why it failed.
That's not a real excuse when Esports is a 2.13 billion dollar industry and is projected to double by 2030. Lawbreakers tried that excuse to explain what they did wrong but in reality, the Xtreme marketing with Cliffy B being the worst advocate for a rather generic experience was enough to kill that game.
 
ResetEra is guntguarding hard for Geoff, as if he isn't ownd by Tencent.
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LOL LOSER
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Wildlight's studio head dropping some info:
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Apparently backend numbers were pretty good, the game just sucked that much ass, lmao.
 
BUT WE PLUGGED OUR EARS AND KEPT SCREAMING THAT IT WAS A MASSIVE SUCCESS AND NOT A FLOP
The thing is they all knew where it was headed since TGA, Everything since was just posturing as a desperate attempt to convince people that the game won't shut down in 2 months and therefore it's not a terrible idea to invest time or money into it. They knew the ballroom was on fire, but they had no choice but to keep dancing

Why weren't there skill trees at lauch?
This is the meta for slop games now. Launch 50% of a game you would buy on the xbox 360 15 years ago, release the other 50% as "updates" over the next 2-3 years. Sadly some games have made obscene amounts of money using this approach

Also I don't even know how the fuck skill trees would fit into a game like this, It's supposed to be a serious CS:GO type game so having players go into it with an advantage would be retarded. Unless it's skill trees that you level up midgame, in which case it's even more retarded that they left it out because one of the game's biggest problem was that no meaningful upgrades spawned until round 3 so the first 2 loot phases were a complete time waste
 
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It's telling that the guys who made the game have no idea why it failed.
This to me is proof not only are they not gamers, they don't even know the gaming landscape. Plenty of games are retardedly sweaty, tarkov, pubg, cod (even though its overdone) rust, ect.

Honestly these companies would unironicly be better recruiting fat sweaty gamer nerds as game designers. I can't help but think about modders who make WILDLY popular mods for free.

Doom did this with its reboot to make a new episode, and it was actually pretty good overall, despite a few flaws. They recruited people who WERE in the doom community for a very, very long time, and actually gave a shit about the medium.

Seriously if these assholes had 15 iq points more than an Indian, they would poach promising modder designers from loved mods, give them cash, tell them to make something cool and fuck off.
 
ResetEra is guntguarding hard for Geoff, as if he isn't ownd by Tencent.
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LOL LOSER
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Wildlight's studio head dropping some info:
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Apparently backend numbers were pretty good, the game just sucked that much ass, lmao.
Wow Mr. Grenier, that's some really cool trivia but did you know that UR GAME IS BORING AS SHIT LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
 
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It's telling that the guys who made the game have no idea why it failed.
to be fair, it doesn't have any really obvious glaring flaws that stand out in a "this is so terrible it killed the game" way

imo highguard mostly fell victim to the "who asked for this" problem. there's tons of team based competitive FPS available, the successful ones all have some unique answer to the "why should i play this over all the others?" question.
>tf2: it's wacky and funny and it's the OG class based shooter
>overwatch: it's got popular goonbait characters and the blizzard polish, high quality hero designs and gameplay
>counterstrike: it's the OG tactical shooter and the most hardcore about being competitive
what is highguards answer? what does it offer over the competition? riding horses and mining ore in the middle of an fps match? that doesn't sound very compelling at all to people looking for a shooter to play.
 
It's over. Highguard will shut down on March 12th
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Link | Archive
it's been like a month plus lol
"People should just give things a chance to grow"
The issue with this argument is time. These games keep coming out and the average person who may have tried one of these in the past now has less time but devs still think they are the same people who are willing to soak up their time waiting for these types of games to get to functional states of content. It's a clear sign that they are not longer sustainable and the audiences are/have moved on.
 
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It's telling that the guys who made the game have no idea why it failed.
Well, he is right, but for the wrong reasons.
He made a game aimed at the competitive players, but the market is saturated and the game had zero uniqueness about itself that make it worth being played.
Competing with Fortnite/Apex/PUBG/MarvelRivals/Overwatch/Valorant over the same player base was a doomed prospect without a serious selling point.

He thinks they did not draw players because they were aiming at the wrong players. Which is nonsense, Marvel Rivals demonstrated how to do it, by creating the game around a popular IP, and delivering a smooth gameplay experience. Highguard has no IP, its bland, generic, unimpressive, and the gameplay is boring at best and downright atrocious at worst. Its a shooter that adds a limited set of character abilities, which are so badly animated and slow to execute that just isn't fun to actually play.

All character feel the same and the replay-ability suffers massively.

Why I think he is correct.
They should not have created ANOTHER hero arena shooter live-service game in the first place, and instead taken a look at games like Deep Rock Galactic, Left 4 Dead and Vermintide and created a co-op PvE shooter/looter action game with cross-platform gameplay. Even with the mediocre gameplay Highguard had, they would have been infinitely more successful.
 
Got DAMN WoW drilled to the core of the earth in terms of that.
I think WoW released a new expac yesterday. Its sad that nobody even cares anymore. Their writers are just straight dogwater now. Its even an old god expansion and after just flipping through the last expansion's notes I just cannot bring myself to give a fuck. The writing is still going to be shit. They cant even apply morals to their stories without applying an anvil beat you over the head with it. The writing is about as deep as a kid's pool. Worse yet its all carebear bullshit.


Also they should release Highguard again in like a year. It won't flop again I promise, we were just all busy this time around.
 
As much as I intensely dislike modern Bungie watching delusional retards try and manifest Marathon's failure like white girls on tiktok is really fucking funny. I think Marathon will do just fine for itself even if it isn't as big of a success as Arc Raiders.
Manifest Marathon's failure...?

My brother in Christ, the retarded niggercattle at Bungie manifests failure by setting up employees skin color quota's, pronouns and DEI above merit and having a fun game.
I've nothing to lose if it succeeds, and I'm not buying this whether shit or good, I simply don't spend money on fags who loathe me because of my own skin color and I love to see them burn.

Their whole retarded company and DEI department with focus on shit like this: "Black at Bungie, Trans at Bungie, & Women at Bungie" has caused hundreds of lay-offs already in '23 & '24, Pete Parsons, the CEO-rat already fled the sinking ship; they're not just shooting themself in the foot, they are shotgun blasting their own jaw Ronnie McNutt style.
 
If they want to gamble on these big games hoping they'll be the next Overwatch, they should just spend dramatically less money on them but keep them alive for longer. You never know when something will hit its second wind because of memes or content creators or whatever. See: Among Us, PUBG, etc. They spend trillions on these shot-in-the-dark trendchasers on the off chance they manage to hit it big IMMEDIATELY, or else all the money goes down the drain.

If you put Bossman Jack in charge of one of these companies, nothing would change.
 
Rivals' entire business strategy is literally just;

"Herro white pigu, we make anuda big boobie white woman fo yu. Prease remembah to buy di big ass skin in di sto."

And it prints them millions of dollars despite it being the definition of online zoomer slop. It's such low effort, easy money that the fact it's still so rarely capitalised on just shows how mindnumbingly retarded a lot of Western devs have gotten. And I say that as someone who doesn't even like gooner shit in my games, but I know it prints money if paired with even half-way competent game design. But I don't think even goon bait could have saved Highguard, I only played two matches but it was so mind numbingly boring it made nu-Marathon look like a stroke of genius in comparison.
I mean, goober shit is a guarantee it seems, so long as it has style. I mean, just look at how much Rule 34 Overwatch has.

But it should be noted that Overwatch has style. It’s cartoony, and its characters are very, very distinct from one another. Same with Rivals.

Gooner shit could have been possible for Highguard, but obviously, other issues plagued this game, which have been elaborated on already. Concord had no gooner shit and was uninspired.
 
While a lot of people have raised valid points, I want to raise another one: the totality of people playing live service games is a zero sum game.

It's something pointed out time and again over the years by almost everyone who plays games more than a casual audience.

You have to not only compete immediately with what's currently on the market, but what might appear on the market after you push your game. Retention is incredibly hard within these types of games and usually comes down to exploiting your player's sunk-cost fallacy, most people will not move from say, EFT to Marathon because they like EFT, they've spent thousands of hours and upwards of $100+ to play that game, they won't suddenly jump ship to Marathon when it'll mean having less of a game to play to begin with, because that's the other issue..

When you have played a game for (picking a number out of the hat here) 6 years which is an MMO/LS, that's 6 years that game has refined the formula to be successful or comfortable for that player and the playerbase as a whole (Hopefully), a new MMO/LS will release without that and will almost always be 'Behind' other videogames in terms of almost all forms of content, which is where the whole "You must have a niche" comes in from business studies 101.

It's not enough anymore to just be "Like that previous game.... BUT WITH BETTER GRAPHICS!" because that's not working anymore, casual gamers do not have the attention span to care beyond 3 weeks and hardcore gamers want something with a lot of content to get their teeth into, if they don't have that they simply jump ship. You really do have to provide something in terms of gameplay to bring spice to what you're offering and stand apart from the competition, this is why the Indie market has seen better success in some areas than Triple A as Triple A is adverse to innovation and experimentation due to the amount of money and manhours they throw at absolutely everything they produce. I will say, the 'On surface' idea of Highguard does sound relatively interesting with a seriously poor implementation behind it, I think the biggest question everyone had was "Why only two very small teams on huge maps?" To my understanding it was 6~ players on a map the size of a Battlefield map which is insane. The solution which would've been cool but unwieldly would be "Same map size, bigger teams", but given how even having anything beyond 4v4 means noone can work together you might've been better off with "Smaller maps" or "More teams on the map" to make gameplay better.

But alas, another game which cost life-changing amounts of money has been sacrificed. This is happening at an ever more rapid pace in the post-COVID years as companies realise sinking the insane amount of money they do into videogames isn't profitable or fucking smart. Makes me yearn for the old PS2 days when games were much cheaper, had way more heart and more experimentation going on, sure they were built with paperclips, bubblegum and the hopes and dreams of small children, but by god it really was a better era.
 
This game was doomed from day one. Here was my day 1 experience. Morbid curiosity got the best of me and I wish it didn't

>Had to go into my PC to turn on some bullshit for their anti cheat. Turned off after uninstalling.
>Queue time for getting into the MAIN MENU was maddeningly long. It took me forty minutes.
>training mode was basic as hell. It made Team Fortress 2's look indepth.
>One of the guns was literally an AK rifle. Wooden grips, stock, etc. Not even trying to be imaginative with the idea of fantasy guns.
>After beating training, I was kicked out of the game, given an error, and disconnected. Back to the queue.
>I got two games in. They lasted too quick.
>However, I queued for over 50 DIFFERENT MATCHES that didn't start because of the game lacking backfill. People would deliberately leave during matchmaking just to ruin the matchmaking of the game. This is when it was still 3v3.
>Those two matches had a guy free flying and another guy with godmode. Either that or the servers were that shit at keeping things consistent and couldn't update everyone in real time.
 
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