The Finals at least is a fun as fuck game. The everything goes style also kinda makes sense considering the game is taking place in some kind of VR game show and both mocking of this kind of live service while being a live service game itself.

It's also not a hero shooter; Your dude is supposed to be you. 🤷‍♂️

I mean, it's another FtP PvP base defense shooter. Like we were running short of Team Fortress clones any time in the last ten years.

I do sometimes get the sense that when a marketing team can't gin up artificial enthusiasm, they settle on "controversy" as an attention grabbing strategy. Getting legions of digital skanks to declare a mid-game The Worst Thing Ever at least keeps the title on the radar, rather than falling into obscurity.

Honestly, I'm not even clear how you can spend nine figures on a game when its a copy of a copy of a copy. "We reskinned Tribes again, then dropped a full scale motion picture's budget on the fucking trailer" seems to be how AAA titles get sold these days. No wonder everyone in the industry is so excited about AI.

That and engagement bait.

I’m grossed/weirded out by yet another micro transaction riddled “live service” masquerading as an indie passion project. They even did a disgusting little media tour citing how they want their particular web of sub-nested premium currencies to be particularly ethical, and not charge more than $20 for their awful cosmetics.

The world needs more good games. The world does not need more soulless cash grabs

The lesson should have been learned when Lawbreakers died: you can't release a game that is just "good" into a saturated ecosystem and expect it to succeed. When a game has to compete with six others in the same genre, especially deeply enfranchised titles like Apex or Forkknife, it must be exceptional. Highguard falls well short of that. It's the most average, design-by-committee, risk-averse, trend chasing, white bread, picket fence product I've played in a long time. It's a glass of lukewarm tap water. It's unsalted butter on toast. And that's before Keighley and studio management fucked up its marketing.

If a game has to fail in order for some management type to finally engage that lump of tapioca pudding inside their cranium and let the game system designers create a better game, I won't shed a tear for it. And if this is what the studio made up of alleged "industry veterans" can achieve, I won't shed a tear for it either. We need better games, not more of them.

If the world needs more good games, they should have designed it to last rather than inevitably shutting down in under two years if it doesn't take off.

I agree, and the performance thing was my suspicion as well. It just seems off to have a large scale siege game be so small.

To be honest 5v5 still seems kinda small on paper to me, but I haven't played it.

The focus on player dropoff is always misleading. Free to play games always lose massive numbers of players within the first week generally. What matters is who's left, and what the company's operating budget is. 10k players or even less can be plenty for a small team for instance. With such small player team sizes in-game, that would also be more than enough for a populated feeling queue.