Can We Stop Dunking on Highguard Before It’s Even Out, Please?
On December 11, 2025, Highguard was revealed at The Game Awards. A PvP “raid shooter” from some of the creators behind Apex Legends and Titanfall, Highguard was admittedly somewhat of a surprise as the last reveal of Geoff Keighley’s show in December, which has typically been reserved for highly-anticipated, single-player games such as Naughty Dog’s next project, Intergalactic, or the next Mass Effect. Rather than a big-budget RPG, Highguard’s trailer displayed a multiplayer game rooted in a mix of fantasy and sci-fi, with SMG-wielding heroes riding horses into battle and magical spears hurled into grounded enemies by floating characters. “A new breed of shooter” flashed across the screen as its Overwatch-by-way-of-Concord action played out.
The online reaction to this trailer has not been kind. Type “Highguard” into YouTube, and you’ll be almost exclusively met with videos headlined something along the lines of “This Game is Cooked”, “It’s Worse Than We Thought!”, and “What Happened?”. What’s happened is that it hasn’t even been released yet. And so 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 understand not being into the look of a game, but among the gaming community, it increasingly feels as if there’s now almost an underlying need for new releases to be bad if they’re not exactly what we want from one. I can’t help but feel this attitude is completely unhelpful in the long run, engineered with social media and ragebait content algorithms in mind rather than any kind of thoughtful analysis of what’s on show. Such willingness to dunk on a game for which we only have a single trailer and 10 screenshots displays a complete misunderstanding of (or intentional opposition to) “a rising tide lifts all boats” mentality when it comes to game development. More successful games are, ultimately, good for everyone, even if this specific one doesn’t meet your personal tastes.
Of course, it isn’t just the gameplay fuelling this fire, but the relative lack of noise from developer Wildlight Entertainment following its reveal. More than a month later, this teaser remains the only video on the game’s official YouTube channel which, at the time of writing, still only has 1,610 subscribers — somewhat odd for a game that received such a prized reveal slot on gaming’s biggest night of the year (a slot that, notably, the studio did not pay for – Geoff Keighley simply really liked the project a lot more than the wider gaming sphere seems to.) A similar situation can be seen on social media, where Highguard’s official X account is followed by just over 7,000 people and hasn’t posted since that December 12 announcement date. There are no details on characters, abilities, or maps. There’s not even an explanation of how this “new breed” of PvP works, which is unhelpful considering “raid shooter” is not a commonly recognised genre. Highguard itself may well not be bad, but the marketing promoting it certainly could be accused of being sub-par.
Perhaps the development team is aiming to recapture lightning in a bottle and recreate the overwhelmingly successful shadow drop that Apex Legends benefited from. Perhaps, when it arrives, we’ll all be hooked – afterall, it’s directed by Chad Grenier, one of the original Call of Duty designers whose credits include the first two Modern Warfare games, both Titanfalls, and Apex Legends, and he’s joined by multiple other veterans of hugely successful games. But prior success is not a guaranteed key to victory, and yes, perhaps the final product will end up being underwhelming. But even knowing that, it’s disheartening to see that this failure has already been presumed by many online; a predetermined fate, if you will.
You may well feel that Highguard’s action doesn’t look like your cup of tea from the less than two minutes you’ve seen of it, and for all I know, once it launches on January 26, it may well struggle to find a substantial audience. But it’s this immediate and complete writing off of a game that irks me somewhat.
I realise I’m largely swimming against a tide of minds that have been made up here. We all know that, on the internet in 2026, it’s much easier to tear something down than reinforce it with optimism. But I can’t help but feel that many of the same people gleefully rubbing their hands together at what looks like another underwhelming game in their eyes, will be the same bemoaning the fact that the games industry is in a difficult spot where layoffs and studio closures seemingly happen on a weekly basis, putting the creatives they admire out of work. If no one is attempting to make new experiences and at least try to deliver on the promise of a “new breed of shooter”, then we’re in a grim place, indeed.
Looking further ahead, Marathon will finally launch in March 2026. It’s been a rocky road for developer Bungie so far, with last year being full of beta tests that were met with little enthusiasm, and plagiarism allegations not helping the studio’s reputation at all. But to its credit, Bungie has been very quiet these last few months, working hard on a new version of the game that takes into account much of the feedback received from its burgeoning community. I, for one, am excited for it, despite not being overly interested in the extraction shooter genre. While many may already see (or, indeed, want to see) the writing on the wall amid hasty comparisons to Sony’s previous live-service shooter, Concord, I remain hopeful, largely due to believing in the shooter pedigree the Destiny developer is bringing to the project, much like the ex-Titanfall and Apex Legends team is carrying forward to Highguard.
Again, I’m by no means convinced that either of these games will be blockbuster hits, nor guarantee that they’ll be amazing shooters in their own right, but I at least want to give them a chance. Because if we’re not getting excited about games, what are we even doing here? “Never judge a book by its cover” is an age-old phrase, but one that seems as pertinent as ever. Maybe in 2026, it should be updated to “Never judge a game by its initial teaser and lack of marketing beats running up to launch”. A mouthful, sure, but we’ll never discover the next great game if we’ve endeavoured to kill it before it even arrives.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.
