Creative director Adrian Chmielarz of The Astronauts, behind RPG shooter Witchfire and first-person adventure The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, argues Wildlight Studios' Highguard was "bad" and stood "no chance" in a hyper-competitive market.
In a response to a post from laid-off Highguard tech artist Josh Sobel, in which Sobel claimed that internal Highguard sentiments pre-launch were that "there's no way this will flop," Chmielarz examines the "mystery" of "games that hundreds of people work on for years, and nobody can see that they are just bad".
Sobel was soft in his criticism of Highguard's gameplay and launch strategy, but did acknowledge that, even if its launch hadn't been saddled with orbiting negativity, things wouldn't suddenly have been perfect. "I'm not saying our failure is purely the fault of gamer culture and that the game would have thrived without the negative discourse, but it absolutely played a role," he said.
Chmielarz is harsher in his evaluation. "Now you have a developer still unable to believe they made a bad game," he says. "No, it's 'the gamer culture' that killed it. And The Game Awards. And the rage-baiting YouTubers."
On this particular point, Sobel said in his post: "I also don’t think there’s any way to know whether the launch would have fared better or worse without the massive spotlight that was thrown onto us in response to The Game Awards’ trailer placement."
Chmielarz adds: "Not the boring, artificial world. Not the pseudo-edgy yet generic characters. Not the corpo-style UI. Not the tired genre."
It's worth remembering Sobel's claim here as well: "All products are at the whims of the consumers, and the consumers put absurd amounts of effort into slandering Highguard. And it worked. "
Again, Chmielarz says, "it truly boggles my mind. The [post from Sobel] starts with quotes about how the game was received internally, yet all it took was one trailer for an average gamer to understand this was doomed to fail.
"Highguard, Concord, the Painkiller reboot, and more – hundreds of people worked on these games for years. How does it happen that they ever see the light of day in the form they do? What is this? Is this the legendary 'toxic positivity'? Something else? Tell me," he concludes. Chmielarz was notably creative director at Painkiller and Bulletstorm maker People Can Fly in the past.
Truths can co-exist here. Highguard faced some unfair and off-topic criticism, and some players had already chambered their negative reviews well before they played the game, but it is also a not-good game competing in a space where even truly great games regularly die. That said, I don't know that nobody at Wildlight raised concerns about its shape or strategy – but if those concerns were shared, the folks at the helm demonstrably didn't listen, or at least not in time, with most of the studio now laid off.
