Highguard - Concord 2.0?

[Fucker Carlson]

Not sure what there is to argue about. I was quite literally unable to play it without fucking around in BIOS. I am someone who actually understands how to do that, and I wasn't willing to, in order to play some garbage looking shooter with my friends for a few hours. What were they expecting? For people less tech literate than me to give a shit about the new hotness, looking up tutorials for an hour just to play fucking Highguard?

You know Fortnite didn't launch with those as requirements? They only added them later, in response to cheating, and importantly, after they already had a dedicated playerbase. Of course Fortnite is a bit of an anomaly.

also even if you have it on sometimes games will just be retarded and think that you have it off for some reason, highguard did that for me so the retards who made this shit can go apply for unemployment i guess

 

[DiabeticSydePhil]

Like I get its all sunk cost and your shitty studio can't stay afloat without launching something and praying it hits....

But surely after watching Concord crash prove that gamers don't want new hero shooters, why the fuck didn't you pivot to ANYTHING else??

 

[moocow]

You know Fortnite didn't launch with those as requirements? They only added them later, in response to cheating, and importantly, after they already had a dedicated playerbase. Of course Fortnite is a bit of an anomaly.

And of course neither of those technologies actually help to "solve" or prevent cheating anyway.

Secure Boot guarantees you're running a signed kernel. Big whoop. Said "signed kernel" will still allow an administrator (i.e. you) to install unsigned device drivers. Whoops. There goes your "kernel-level anti-cheat" since now another driver can step on it anyway, with full cooperation of that blessed, precious, super-secure and tamper-proof signed kernel.

TPM? Oh no, a game client has decided to accuse you of cheating, and so your PC's unique TPM ID has now been emblazoned with the SCARLET LETTER for all eternity. Bummer. Now ... lemme just go snag a $5 TPM 2.0 module, pop the hood of my PC and swap out the module. Oh look, I have a different ID now and I can get back into the game anyway.

Hot damn. All that tech did fuck all. Great job.

 

[Jonny Greenwood]

And of course neither of those technologies actually help to "solve" or prevent cheating anyway.

Secure Boot guarantees you're running a signed kernel. Big whoop. Said "signed kernel" will still allow an administrator (i.e. you) to install unsigned device drivers. Whoops. There goes your "kernel-level anti-cheat" since now another driver can step on it anyway, with full cooperation of that blessed, precious, super-secure and tamper-proof signed kernel.

TPM? Oh no, a game client has decided to accuse you of cheating, and so your PC's unique TPM ID has now been emblazoned with the SCARLET LETTER for all eternity. Bummer. Now ... lemme just go snag a $5 TPM 2.0 module, pop the hood of my PC and swap out the module. Oh look, I have a different ID now and I can get back into the game anyway.

Hot damn. All that tech did fuck all. Great job.

It's kind of sad that shitty jewfuck video game companies have tarnished the reputation of TPM because it's actually a really useful module

 

[Leaf Wage Slave Jr]

But surely after watching Concord crash prove that gamers don't want new hero shooters, why the fuck didn't you pivot to ANYTHING else??

I think it’s a combination of sunk cost fallacy and the borderline obscene dev times modern AAA has. I’d be willing to bet that most of these Concord-likes were greenlit at the peak of Overwatch’s popularity, and they have to try and make up a decade of dev costs/time.

Just ignoring that the audience for Live Service games is pretty entrenched in their preferred games as is, or how preferences of Joe Casual have changed away from Hero Shooters (unless, of course, they actually bring something to the table to bring in Normies and Casuals, see Marvel Rivals)

 

[moocow]

It's kind of sad that shitty jewfuck video game companies have tarnished the reputation of TPM because it's actually a really useful module

That's the curse of technology -- anything with a reasonably decent (intended) application can and will be immediately subverted and used for retarded bullshit purposes, usually overwhelmingly, and often at the expense of those legitimate uses.

 

[BoomerSperg1922]

But surely after watching Concord crash prove that gamers don't want new hero shooters, why the fuck didn't you pivot to ANYTHING else??

I keep wondering if they were planning on selling Highguard for $20-60 and then they just made it free after concord thinking that would be enough.

 

[Tommy 2010 NC Channel]

They had to self delete because they won't be able to compete with Concord 3 coming out tomorrow

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

There's a lot of pointless discussion and circlejerking in the thread. It's time to post game journos crying about it.

Aftermath (Nathan Grayson): Highguard Didn't Have To Fail (archive) (ghost) (mega)

In an industry of constant change whose foundations might be cracked beyond repair, there’s no room for hubris, especially when hundreds of jobs are on the line. The usual suspects are celebrating today, but in ascribing Highguard’s failure to bottom-of-the-barrel culture war concerns, they’ve once again missed the mark (not that they were ever trying to hit it in the first place). Talented people poured years of their lives into something that could’ve been great under the right, potentially achievable conditions. Instead, all their hard work is now swirling the drain. That’s nothing to cheer about; that’s a tragedy.

The usual suspects link:
https://x.com/DrDisrespect/status/2028963632944693697 (nitter)

The shill Morgan Park from PC Gamer is crying today, another game he praised have failed

View attachment 8651148

PC Gamer (Morgan Park): RIP Highguard: In a better world, an FPS is allowed to be unpopular (archive)

I won't relitigate the noxious cloud of internet that surrounded Highguard, because ultimately, premature "hate playing" is not the reason it's going away. Highguard is shutting down because live service games are not allowed to be unpopular.

It's important to establish that Highguard had fans. Thousands of people were playing it—its regular concurrents hung around 400 on Steam and at least double that on PS5, according to game director Chad Grenier. Remember, peak concurrents are not a measure of how many total people played a game that day—that number is usually much higher but never public.

Highguard was not a dead game, it's being murdered. Its only sin was not living up to expectations that only a dumb or spiritually bankrupt person would foist upon it. And when news of its execution came down the pipe, there was, of course, no mention of options to keep Highguard playable even if it'd no longer be worked on. No possibility of third-party servers, no offline mode.

That's because its financiers did not ever care about Highguard, the people who made it, or the fans who played it. Tencent did not want a game, it wanted a whaling operation.

Older article:
PC Gamer (Tyler Wilde): Highguard didn't flop (archive)

As pointlessly rabid as the social media response to Highguard has been, I don't think the internet's recreational cruelty is to blame for the modest playerbase. I don't think any deep analysis at all is required to understand why Highguard isn't a huge hit. It's a decent game—Morgan gave it a 65% in his review—but even if it had been a great game it wouldn't necessarily have blown up like Arc Raiders, because most games don't.

 

[Jace on ice]

Apart from the one black guy with the Killmonger cut I didn't see anything particularly woke in Highguard so I can't see why these troon journalists would be sucking it's dick so hard unless they also got ching chong money like Dorito pope.

 

[Belvedere]

The fact that this turd turned out to be a Tencent funded abomination trying to pass itself as an "indie" project only makes me happier it was kicked to the curve as it was. Please more of this, the massive multimillion Skinner Boxes these corpos are trying to pass off as games need to continue dying on the vine.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Design Director Jason McCord posted this executive AF statement about the game on his LinkedIn:



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.

 

[b0t]

I'll never understand why people think that claiming "if a unknowable amount of things were different, this game would have worked" is a valid reason for a games failure when its just a pathetic excuse to not face the fact that you made a shit game. There are plenty of good games that release in bad windows and struggle but the new idea is to just kill games off when they dont immediately make 50 times the cost.

Anytime a game trailer starts with "from the people that made random game you liked before" I immediately lose interest now, because its just gonna be middling dipshits that had next to no impact on the previous successful game.

 

[Snekposter]

While I agree that the big corps are fucking themselves in the ass raw with no lube...

...if you think the days of small teams and one man bands are done, you need to go walk through the indie sections again. There's trash there, yes, but there's also gold to be found.

I just finished Wicked Seed, and while janky, its clearly a love letter to the horror genre by a single dude, with some help from his wife and one of his buddies in exchange for some six packs of beer for voicing the two men.

Half the outfits you can equip Ella with are from Resident Evil games, after all, like the Classic Jill with dress and the aptly titled "Ballistics" outfit.

 

[LecherousGranolaBar]

Like I get its all sunk cost and your shitty studio can't stay afloat without launching something and praying it hits....

But surely after watching Concord crash prove that gamers don't want new hero shooters, why the fuck didn't you pivot to ANYTHING else??

Because these bigger companies don't care how many of these things fucking flop. All it takes is one to succeed for their gamble to payoff.

Plus not to mention since this was stealth funded by Tencent, the failure doesn't reflect on them at all so they can just keep pumping this shit out with shell companies that eat the bad reputation earned.

 

[Astro Galactic Megalul]

I'll never understand why people think that claiming "if a unknowable amount of things were different, this game would have worked" is a valid reason for a games failure when its just a pathetic excuse to not face the fact that you made a shit game. There are plenty of good games that release in bad windows and struggle but the new idea is to just kill games off when they dont immediately make 50 times the cost.

Anytime a game trailer starts with "from the people that made random game you liked before" I immediately lose interest now, because its just gonna be middling dipshits that had next to no impact on the previous successful game.

If I wasn't broke, I would've been rich. I deserve to be rich. Feel bad that I'm not.

 

[Fat Camp Intern]

If I dye my hair vomit green, wear a dress and bathe in poo, can I get a $200k a year job making some straight white male programmer's life miserable?

I mean seriously, what does it take to get a job as one of these gargantuan losers who work at these studios?

 

[Kane Lives]

I mean seriously, what does it take to get a job as one of these gargantuan losers who work at these studios?

Your soul. And possibly your genitals.

 

[Fat Camp Intern]

But surely after watching Concord crash prove that gamers don't want new hero shooters, why the fuck didn't you pivot to ANYTHING else??

Because none of the wokes working in the game studios know how to actually make a video game. They fired all the straight white males that started the projects 8 years ago lol

 

[WULULULULU]

The fact that this turd turned out to be a Tencent funded abomination trying to pass itself as an "indie" project only makes me happier it was kicked to the curve as it was. Please more of this, the massive multimillion Skinner Boxes these corpos are trying to pass off as games need to continue dying on the vine.

Isn't Trump doing something about Tencent? IIRC he is contacting the US rep of Tencent or something.