We Need to Talk Highguard: Players Leave Industry Pretends

Hello there, shooter fans who actually played the game, developers watching player counts drop in real time, and journalists still pretending this launch is a misunderstanding.

Because whatever is happening around Wildlight Entertainment Highguard, it’s not a mystery. It’s not a culture war. It’s not review bombing. And it reminder number one hundred that pretending players are wrong is the fastest way to kill a game and your credibility with it.

Highguard didn’t fail because people didn’t “get it.” It failed because people played it, didn’t like it, and left.

That should have been the end of the story. Somehow, it wasn’t.

Players didn’t disappear. They walked away.

Highguard launched with momentum. The Game Awards slot did its job. Curiosity was high. Nearly 100,000 players showed up.

And then the floor dropped out.

Within hours, player counts were cut in half. Within a day, they collapsed further. Not because of a conspiracy, but because the experience didn’t hold people. Servers failed. Matches died before they started. Lobbies emptied. People spent more time in menus than in firefights.

You don’t need ten hours to recognize that. You need one match that doesn’t work.

🦊 Kiki: I’ve played enough shooters to know when something’s off immediately. Bad feel shows itself fast. You don’t “grow into” boredom. You notice it, and you bounce.

🍪 Chip watches a loading spinner loop, arms crossed.

The game’s biggest problem is also its simplest

Highguard calls itself fast-paced. It isn’t.

The maps are enormous. Player count is 3v3. That alone should have triggered alarms during prototyping. Instead, you spend most matches running through empty spaces, looting shallow junk, breaking crystals, opening chests, waiting for the game to start.

When combat finally happens, it doesn’t land.

Guns feel bad. Recoil feels arbitrary. Sights feel off. There’s no rhythm. No momentum. No satisfaction. Which is wild, considering how loudly the team’s Titanfall and Apex pedigree was marketed.

That experience is not showing up in the hands.

🦊 Kiki: You can tell when a shooter respects your time by how quickly it gives you friction or flow. Highguard gives you neither. Just space. And waiting.

🍪 Chip stares at a wide open map. Nothing happens.

“Good ideas” don’t matter if none of them are finished

Yes, Highguard has ideas.

Base fortification. A raid phase. A Counter-Strike-inspired objective loop.

On paper, that’s fine.

In practice, it collapses almost immediately. Fortifications melt. Abilities bypass defenses. Once a base is breached, creativity dies and you’re trading shots in choke points. No meaningful choices. No real planning. No adaptation.

Looting is even worse.

There’s no pressure. No contested resources. No urgency. You wander, you loot, you buy what RNG didn’t give you. Every match ends up with the same loadout, the same flow, the same outcome.

It’s repetitive, predictable, and painfully boring.

🦊 Kiki: The most embarrassing thing a game can be isn’t broken. It’s dull. Broken can be fixed. Dull gets uninstalled.

🍪 Chip drops a crystal. It shatters. Still nothing happens.

This is where the coverage breaks from reality

Here’s the part that actually matters.

Players were saying all of this immediately. Consistently. Specifically. Verifiably.

And yet, much of the coverage went into defense mode.

Criticism was waved away as internet toxicity. Steam reviews were dismissed because of playtime. Players were told they needed more matches, more hours, more patience before their opinion counted.

That’s not journalism. That’s gatekeeping.

You don’t need five matches to know a game feels bad. You don’t need ten hours to recognize boredom. And no customer owes a product their time just to validate feedback.

🦊 Kiki: If someone quits in under an hour, that’s not invalid feedback. That’s the most important feedback you’ll ever get. Your game failed its first job.

🍪 Chip quietly leaves the lobby.

The preview pipeline explains a lot

The more details that came out, the more this made sense.

Invite-only previews. Mostly journalists. Safe creators. No hard critics. No competitive shooter grinders.

A tightly controlled environment, designed to produce glowing impressions. We’ve seen this playbook before. Electronic Arts (EA) Dragon Age: The Veilguard followed the same script.

When everyone in the room is incentivized to be polite, the product never gets challenged. And when it finally hits players, reality hits harder.

🦊 Kiki: If the first real test of your game is launch day, you didn’t test it. You delayed the truth.

🍪 Chip watches player numbers fall.

Stop pretending players are the problem

This obsession with proving players wrong is corrosive.

They aren’t obligated to like your game. They aren’t required to stick around. They don’t owe you patience.

Games owe players an experience worth staying for. That’s the equation. Flip it, and you fail every time.

What’s happening with Highguard isn’t cruelty. It’s consequence.

🦊 Kiki: Every time the industry says “players don’t get it,” it teaches itself the wrong lesson. And then it repeats the same mistake with the next game.

🍪 Chip looks at another live service announcement. Sighs.