It’s not that there weren’t big announcements at The Game Awards this year, from Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic to Divinity, it’s the strangeness of what closed the show. In the spot usually reserved for some jaw-dropping, hugely anticipated reveal, we instead got Highguard, a game from ex-Titanfall and Apex Legends devs that once again dives into the hero shooter space (calling itself a “raid shooter”), though this time blending medieval and future tech. You ride horses.
While the gameplay did stand out at least a little bit from others in the genre (it helped that the insanely generic 4:LOOP was earlier in the show), as a closer, it felt drastically out of place. And that extra attention seems to have backfired, as the immediate and now prolonged aftermath of the reveal has not been positive. Not good for a game that releases as a free-to-play offering just over a month from now on January 26.
Reception is poor. All you have to do is head to YouTube to see that it has a significantly underwater like/dislike ratio on all its trailers, 1:10 or less across spots from IGN, Gamespot and Game Awards uploads. Combining all those video views, it doesn’t even have 300,000 in total.
It may seem like a questionable metric, but I’ve found YouTube ratios like this more predictive than you might imagine. A positive one doesn’t always mean success, but a deeply skewed negative one like this very much implies a rough, if not disastrous, road ahead. Fairgames, the Sony hero heist shooter that may be on the verge of cancellation, has a similar ratio. As does, you guessed it, Concord, from the very first spots that arrived with its reveal. And it’s not that live/hero games can’t be received positively. Marvel Rivals had a 10:1 positive ratio despite looking like an Overwatch clone right out of the gate. Helldivers 2’s announcement trailer was about 98% positive.
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In this case, there’s also practically zero time to turn this perception around, given that launch is in just over a month. I absolutely do not expect it to do all-time awful Concord numbers (especially as a free-to-play title), but it’s a hugely uphill battle after what they thought might be a chance to shine at The Game Awards. Instead, the opposite happened.
The complaints are numerous. There are too many hero shooters. It looks too generic. The aesthetic is bad. They should have made Titanfall 3, etc. etc. It is not impossible for a new, live hero/PvP game to break out in this market, however difficult it may be, but your concept and execution must be almost flawless, and as of this week, Highguard has stumbled out of the gate, unable to sell gamers on at the very least, its appearance and premise.
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