What are we to make of Highguard?

There was blood in the water around Highguard from the jump.

The game, which launched on Monday, was revealed at December’s Game Awards ceremony, appearing as the “one more thing…” at the end of the show. Geoff Keighley, the award ceremony’s organizer and host, pitched its development as a sort of indie Manhattan Project aimed squarely at “[pushing] the shooter genre forward.” But that first trailer was weird — not compelling weird but just “huh?” weird — prompting a lot of questions about what exactly the game was supposed to be and why it merited the coveted end of show slot. In the weeks between that reveal and launch, the developers imposed a total media blackout, opting to eventually let the game speak for itself, and in doing so, inadvertently created a vacuum that was filled by Steam Chart doomsaying and debate over marketing strategy.

It is virtual orthodoxy in gamer circles that new hero shooters are dead on arrival; that players are tired of live service games and unwilling to migrate from one to another; that being the third (or god forbid, fourth) entrant to a genre that already has a dominant market-leading title is a recipe for studio closure. Then there’s the shadow of Concord, probably the largest and most high-profile flop in recent video game history, looming over any video game with less than certain chances of success. All of this, coupled with the developers’ silence, made shorting Highguard on the vibes market the safest bet around. The negativity surrounding the game was so pronounced that it prompted a plea from IGN in the form of an editorial titled: “Can We Stop Dunking on Highguard Before It's Even Out, Please?”

It would feel like a small betrayal of my whole project here if I did not pause to engage with the text — to say what I think of Highguard myself, having played it for ~6 hours this week. Highguard is… alright! It’s fine. The gunplay is crackly and frenetic (one of the smgs seems slightly overtuned but whatever), the horseback riding is smooth and floaty but in a strangely delightful way, the rhythm of mining for resources tickles the pleasure centers in the brain and the whole package makes sense after you’ve played a few matches, which go by mercifully quickly if you’re hopelessly outmatched. There’s no widely accepted name for this kind of game (the developers call it a “raid shooter”) but the idea is simple enough: Fortify your base, go out into the open world in search of resources to bolster your arsenal, fight over the opportunity to initiate a raid at your opponents’ base, and then, based on the outcome of that fight, try to plant a bomb in the enemy fortress or repel their efforts to do the same to you. I can envision with perfect ease players plumbing the strategic depths of Highguard and surfacing with genuine treasures. Eventually.

Crucially, Highguard is neither the disaster people seemed to hope it would be, nor the next Apex Legends. It does a few interesting and novel things without even a whiff of panache. When I streamed the game to some friends, they burst out laughing when they saw the siege tower, which kicks off the raid portion of the match by slamming a battering ram in the shape of a panther’s head into a bubble shield. The worst insult I can honestly muster about Highguard is that it is totally affectless. It resembles a default-looking video game you might see someone playing in a movie — say, the gormless slob boyfriend of the love interest, doomed to be abandoned in favor of the protagonist. Playing Highguard is just more evidence of his deficiency.

I think it would be uncontroversial to say that the conversation surrounding Highguard’s marketing was maybe a little mean-spirited. The thing that makes me nervous is trying to define who or what might be at fault — and if “fault” is even the right way of thinking about it. Who makes discourse? It would be easy to pin the blame on gaming YouTubers and streamers or content creators more broadly. Pick an Online Gaming Personality at random and you are more than likely to have found someone with an analytical framework that is starkly black and white. Things are either The Best Ever or A Disaster. To question the sincerity of these pronouncements is to miss the point. They are driven by the momentum of online content creation, which, barring genuine insight or wit, requires a constant stream of things to have intense feelings about.¹ These people talk about games in a mode that is not normal; they are in a constant race to out-overstate their peers. But I don’t really believe that gamers are in total thrall to the content they see online. I’m sure plenty of people came to their own negative conclusions about Highguard in a benign and unobjectionable way: They watched the trailer and decided, “That’s not for me.” Still, it does feel a little bit like we’re all breathing polluted air, as regards the discursive ecosystem surrounding video games.

What is the role of professional criticism in all this? (I’m referring here to people, often writers, who take a critical lens to the world and works of art, not to “critics” as a catchall term for people who gin up outrage or engage in impish bomb-throwing.² A good critic, as I’ve written before, can offer people a second admission to a work through an interesting observation or compelling reading.) The subject arose last week in the context of the aforementioned IGN article, the thesis sentence of which is: “I’m here to state what I thought would be obvious: we should actually play games before we definitively decide if they’re good or bad.”

I don’t know what reception the article got in the broader games-press-reading world, but it was received quite poorly in at least one corner of the internet: the Bluesky games crit corner.³

“This is not criticism. This is not even journalism. This is marketing. You are a (unpaid) marketer,” wrote critic Yussef Cole of the IGN article on Bluesky. And in a blistering response, the critic Autumn Wright assailed the piece as “an argument for poptimism, for a press that balances vitriol with enthusiasm — for the status quo of games media as a whole.” (I directionally agree.)

Still, I find myself in a bit of a bind here. I think the IGN article stumbles in its particulars. It is a strong headline in search of an argument, and that argument just doesn’t fully materialize. Wright correctly identifies that “if we’re not getting excited about games, what are we even doing here?” is, from a professional standpoint, a questionable first principle for a member of the games press. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that in its broad strokes, the point the article makes is more or less unobjectionable. I don’t know if the author of the IGN piece would call himself a critic, but “play game first, analyze after” feels like a lesson from Day One At The Criticism Academy, not an implicit threat to critical appraisal. It is probably a good instinct to not judge a game by its marketing. I don’t mean this in a “don’t judge a book by its cover” sense, though I suppose I mean that too. Mostly, I don’t think anyone is particularly well served or enriched by speculation or even earnest analysis deriving from marketing material.⁴  

That said, while I believe in the sort of monastic professional crit credo of ~analysis comes from serious open-minded engagement with the work~ there needs to be a way to speak honestly about the fact that some games — and Highguard in particular, in this case — look terrible, and that reasonable aesthetic pre-judgments can be made in good faith. Sometimes the mean-spirited opinion of the crowd turns out to be correct. Sometimes the safe bet is a safe bet for a reason. Is there a responsible way to say “I’m pretty sure this thing will suck” without betraying the idea of good stewardship of the craft of criticism?

I publish infrequently and am often late to the punch. I do not feel that I share a space professionally with reactionaries and rage-baiters on YouTube. But I do feel some anxiety over the fact that by acting in ways that align with my view of what good-faith criticism is — waiting, taking a beat, engaging thoughtfully, etc. — I am absolutely, without fail, ceding ground to those people. And I am not sure that we can “wait and see” our way to a more thoughtful internet.

Just thinking out loud here. If you have thoughts, give me a shout.

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If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky, on Twitter or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

1  To say nothing of the greater-enough-than-zero-to-be-concerning chance that any given content creator is someone who sits at the unholy intersection of World War II memorabilia enthusiast and maladjusted Nielsen ratings obsessive. There is an enormous constituency for this sort of person, made up of people predisposed to ask Grok to explain something to them. But this kind of creator figures less into my thinking here because the genuine ideologues actually seem to me to be in the minority relative to people who sort of accidentally stumble into outrage bait.

2  Though there’s a time and place for this sort of thing, too.

3  I’m not trying to be facetious or reductive here, this is just how I would most accurately describe this group of people. I count myself among them!

4  I think one could make an earnest academic argument that in the case of Highguard, the marketing has become an inseparable part of the whole package, but that’s a bit outside of the scope of what I’m talking about here. I would read an essay about this, though!