Why are gamers hoping Highguard will be dead on arrival?

Closing out this year’s ceremony, The Game Awards gave us our first look at Highguard, an upcoming PvP shooter launching early next year. 

However, in the time since its big reveal, online discourse surrounding Highguard has quickly turned sour, with the announcement trailer receiving a 10:1 dislike ratio and plastered with disparaging comments. But why has the backlash been so strong and is it at all justified? 

As far as final reveals go at The Game Awards, Highguard’s debut wasn’t the mic drop moment it was hyped up to be. The short two-and-a-half teaser, while flashy, did little to support the claims being made that this is a truly new breed of online shooter. Even as someone who is excited to get some hands-on time with Highguard – and one of the few people who enjoyed Concord – we had already seen more eye-popping reveals earlier in the show. Highguard didn’t fit the normal template we’ve become accustomed to. Fate of the Old Republic might have been a better closer, dropping a vague cinematic announcement despite being years off from release. 

Highguard may have received an almighty signal boost thanks to The Game Awards but how many will tune in to play a new hero shooter with MOBA elements in 2026? The biggest problem for new developer Wildlight Entertainment is the ongoing fatigue surrounding the subgenre which, at its peak, unceremoniously eliminated Sony’s big budget contender, Concord. 

It’s not all doom and gloom for online shooters, of course. Arc Raiders managed to pull it out of the bag for Embark Studios despite the PvP extraction subgenre also showing its age. As long as a game can meaningfully iterate on an existing formula – or appear different enough from its competitors – it has a fighting chance.

That’s why some of the knee-jerk negativity surrounding Highguard seems premature. The presence of mounts suggests there will be large maps, with Wildlight labelling the game as a “raid shooter”, meaning that it won’t ascribe to traditional game modes as seen in Overwatch. As for the visuals, which have been called generic and uninspired by online commenters, we can’t help but feel sorry for the art team. Anything particularly toonish or stylised would immediately get called out as derivative and, while some of the character designs don’t scream out to me, I like Highguard’s gunslinging/fantasy vibe.

Ultimately, we’ve yet to see the game in action, and we’re always willing to see what a new studio can come up with, especially one helmed by Titanfall and Apex legends veterans. The negative response to Highguard hints at a growing problem in the industry, where commentators are quick to form narratives about a game’s success without ever playing it for themselves. These are the same people who will be desperately watching Steam stats when Highguard launches, salivating at a chance to publish a “dead on arrival” takedown of the game they’ve already got saved in their drafts.

Even if Highguard doesn’t live up to the scorching hype levels stoked by The Game Awards, we need to give developers a chance, even if they are iterating on concepts and ideas that feel done to death.