One does not simply drop into Highguard and have a great time. It’s a hero shooter where matches have multiple phases and small teams make tight-knit coordination and communication paramount. Wildlight Entertainment senior level designer Alex Graner thinks the game was too “sweaty” for casual players and that’s why so many bounced off of it on the launch day.
“3v3 duos is always the sweatiest version of anything like battle royale, objective modes, wingman, you know it, you name it,” he told the Quad Damage podcast (via PCGamesN). “It requires such a high intensity of communication with your team, and team play, that it doesn’t leave much room for casualness. I think that was the biggest thing that turned a lot of players off Highguard.”
He’s absolutely right. A 3v3 setup requires players sticking together, calling out enemies, and trying to push or flank at the right times. The high time to kill in Highguard, in part due to the armor loot economy, means its very rare for one player to be able to survive if they’re outnumbered, let alone wipe the enemy team on pure skill alone. As a result, advantages come from carefully trying to setup 2v1 scenarios against your opponents and then press the advantage while they’re waiting to respawn.
This is part of what I love about Highguard, but I also only play with friends with a party chat open. It’s not hard to see why anyone trying to compete solo in the game would have a bad time. Coincidentally, this is a problem Marathon is also dealing with at the moment.
“Highguard has all these different rules and stages, it’s like, ‘Oh, you want to loot, now we’ve got to chase this objective, now we have to plant this objective, now it’s overtime…It has all these rules, which I think works at a really high level, but when players are first coming in it’s a lot to grasp,” Graner said.
He continued, “On top of all that, because it was 3v3, that kind of game just requires high-skill movement and shooting, which is already a pretty high [bar to] entry as well. So if you just have a few bad games or your teammates aren’t sticking together, you’re just going to get rolled, and it’s very hard to 1v2 in our game.”
“It’s all designed to be a team-based shooter,” Graner added. “I think that was the biggest thing. People just kind of turned it off because they didn’t have the team.”
The remaining developers at Wildlight have tried to address this by pivoting to 5v5 modes, including a new Raid Rush mode that replaces 3v3 entirely with matches that only consist of the base fighting phase of the game. It’s essentially Counter-Strike, and while it’s not terrible, it also strips out a lot of what makes Highguard feel unique in the first place. The game is currently hanging on for dear life with a small core team of 20 developers, but it’s unclear how much longer it can last after Tencent reportedly bailed following the poor launch.
