I take my shitposts very seriously.
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This is the main reason why Concord’s entirely avoidable failure pissed me off so much. Wildlight’s designers and artists spent years creating an entire game’s worth of assets (they lacked style and identity, but they weren’t bad) and now the game is dead, the studio is dead, and nobody will ever see or use those assets for something better.
I wish they’d sell the assets. I know that some animators would love to get their hands on Scarlet’s model.
(edit) Ah fuck, I did the meme. Highguard. I meant Highguard, not Concord.
Denuvo adds an obscene amount of checks to the executable, which manifests as an increased CPU load (compare Assassin’s Creed Origins with and without it) and poorer performance. It also restricts the game’s availability to legitimate paying customers if there’s any issue with the “is this a new installation” detector.
Would-be pirates were never going to pay for it.
Original article by PEGI: https://pegi.info/news/pegi-expands-age-rating-criteria-interactive-risk-categories
Purchases of in-game content: games with time-limited or quantity-limited offers will be classified with a PEGI 12, games with NFTs or blockchain-related mechanisms will be PEGI 18.
Paid random items: the default rating will be PEGI 16 if the game contains paid random items (and in some cases they can be a PEGI 18).
Play-by-appointment: mechanisms that reward returning to the game (e.g. daily quests) will get a PEGI 7. If these mechanisms punish players for not returning (e.g. by losing content or reducing progress) they will become PEGI 12.
Safe online gameplay: if games contain entirely unrestricted communication features (e.g. no blocking or reporting), they will be PEGI 18.
That wording sounds really unspecific. I wonder how the first two poins will be interpreted with regard to games where the paying for gambling tokens involves multiple steps of conversion. In particular, Genshin Impact and similar games, where the paid currency first has to be converted (at a 1:1 rate) to a general currency that can be earned by engaging with the completely free progression systems.
It absolutely shouldn’t go away. My problem isn’t that Valve is being targeted, but that only Valve is being targeted. It should extend to all of the big players using gambling and addictive conditioning in video games starting with EA and Microslop/Activision, and then all of the gacha games from the east. Targeting Valve and nobody else is extremely suspicious, especially in the wake of the victory over the Rothchilds.
You’re approaching the game from the wrong angle. Progression doesn’t reset because there’s no mechanical progression. The only way to make progress is to uncover more of the story so you know where you should be looking in the next loop, or how to get around an obstacle. It’s a metroidvania of information.
This is where the RTFM mindset is important. If you encounter an issue, there’s multiple decades’ worth of information on the internet that will most likely immediately provide an answer.
The location of installed files is determined by long-standing conventions that were in effect even before Linux was released… but I won’t go into it. You can read about it yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_filesystem
This is my point: do you need to know this? Nine out of ten cases, this is not useful knowledge. I’m a sysadmin and even I don’t need to know where each program’s files are located. You should not be interacting with these files at all. Let a package manager do that.
Destiny is on life support, Hunters Gathering is dead on arrival, Marathon’s future is bleak, Concord is Concord, and the one studio that could’ve printed them easy money is dead because the sorry excuse of a circus that is Sony leadership really wanted a live service God Of War title. Gee, I wonder why sales are low.
I agree completely. There’s only one chance to make a first impression. The final ad slot of TGA needs a worthy game that the audience can be excited about, and putting the most generic, most corporate-looking game there felt like an insult. Kind of like this absolute flop.
Not a lot, just enough to get the feel of the game, but also to realize that I’m not the target audience. In some ways, it’s similar to Counter-Strike 1.6 or Team Fortress 2 back in high school: if I have a group of friends and an hour of free time, then sure, I might hop on. But I won’t be investing the time and long-term effort that an extraction shooter expects of me.
The moment to moment experience is good. Bungie haven’t forgotten how to create a tight FPS experience. But the game needs both longevity and a healthy playerbase, that’s what concerns me. Fans of hardcore extraction shooters already have Tarkov and Hunt, and casual players already have Arc Raiders. It takes something exceptional to move players out of their “home” game.
Marathon is probably life or death for Bungie. Sony can’t exactly afford to put out a mid game after spending so much on the studio… and “mid” is exactly what Marathon felt like. Just like so many copycats during the battle royale boom.
I don’t think it will fail (or if it does, not as hard as Highguard), but unless it manages to stand out from the Tarkov/Arc Raiders/Hunt: Showdown oligopoly, it won’t bring in the numbers to please Sony.
By “dev team”, I’m guessing you mean the artists, designers, programmers, and testers; the people who spent the last five or so years actually creating the game. Yes, it sucks for them. Their years of work have effectively been thrown in the trash because of Wildlight’s management. I hope they find better work soon, and I hope the management become personae non gratae in the industry.
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Mongolian folk music is criminally underutilized.
The player is shown a lot of disturbing imagery, but there is zero tension and no threat. It’s similar to early Chinese Room titles: a pretentious and superficial experience comparable to A Machine For Pigs, without the pigs. Evaluated as a horror game, its horror is ruined by the game. 4/10, the experience isn’t worth the time. Just watch someone else play it.
Forget that, I was mixing up which game I remembered. I thought LOF2 was the one with the insane painter. I know I’ve played both, though (plus Observer), but can’t recall a single damn detail about the second game. I guess the experience was too bland to even retain.
Depends on where the curator draws the line, and you can’t apply sane criteria to what they consider “too woke”. Sometimes a game is put on a woke list because it has a female lead, or a physically strong female character, or non-heteronormative character dynamics, or people of color are present in it… I’ve seen one that was marked as woke because it referenced climate change and climate action. I think it was some popular shooter or something.
Marketing is extremely important for a game’s launch because it’s the only opportunity for a game to make a first impression and set expectations, and to gain player goodwill. When an announcement trailer is presented as the final spot on TGA, the audience expects a game worthy of that spot. Geoff did the game no favour by doing that, or by doubling down on twitter. They’ve cocked up the marketing and ruined player goodwill that may have caused some people to overlook the product’s multiple issues on release.
Coming back from that takes a lot of fucking effort (see: No Man’s Sky), which they’re obviously unwilling to give, so why would players waste their time for the promise of a better game? Highguard is a failure of design, a failure of management, and a failure of marketing; and I’m not at all sad that it’s getting flushed down the drain.
It sucks that the first to feel the effects of this entirely predictable failure are the workers.
That would be true in a vacuum, but there have been plenty of examples of “good” games completely fizzling out simply because they were unremarkable in a saturated market. Lawbreakers was a fairly well-received objective-based team shooter with interesting movement mechanics. It was killed off because it couldn’t compete with Overwatch for players’ time. Then there are the countless battle royale games released during the reign of PUBG and Fortnite, and all the wannabe Halo-killers, CoD-killers, WoW-killers… history is littered with the corpses of “good” but otherwise unremarkable games that thought they were the shit.
Highguard isn’t just a failure of a game, it’s a failure on the studio’s part to learn the lesson: players’ time and attention are limited resources, and you need to be exceptional to compete in a saturated market.
They didn’t just make a bet. They made a bet on the horse with broken legs.
The lesson should have been learned when Lawbreakers died: you can’t release a game that is just “good” into a saturated ecosystem and expect it to succeed. When a game has to compete with six others in the same genre, especially deeply enfranchised titles like Apex or Forkknife, it must be exceptional. Highguard falls well short of that. It’s the most average, design-by-committee, risk-averse, trend chasing, white bread, picket fence product I’ve played in a long time. It’s a glass of lukewarm tap water. It’s unsalted butter on toast. And that’s before Keighley and studio management fucked up its marketing.
If a game has to fail in order for some management type to finally engage that lump of tapioca pudding inside their cranium and let the game system designers create a better game, I won’t shed a tear for it. And if this is what the studio made up of alleged “industry veterans” can achieve, I won’t shed a tear for it either. We need better games, not more of them.
I’m going to guess (this is speculation) that Shotbolt & co. are sanctimonious, self-serving ambulance chaser dipshits. Wolfire and Epic opened the sluice gate and they wanted a slice of the cake in a different jurisdiction. Whatever payout the “gamers” might ever receive (this is NOT speculation) will amount to literal pennies while the lawyers barristers take home millions.
Wildlight is a game development studio made up of former Respawn developers who (allegedly) worked on the Titanfall and Apex Legends games. Highguard was their first game: a pointless, live service, content incomplete multiplayer shooter. It was revealed in late 2025 as the final showcase of The Game Awards, which resulted in a collective sigh of frustration from the audience. The game was released on the 26th of January to a decent peak player count of over 100k (97k players on Steam). It was immediately clear that the game was in a terrible state and it couldn’t retain the players. Two weeks after launch, Wildlight fired most of its staff because Tencent, which had been secretly funding the development, had pulled out. It was later announced that servers would shut down on the 12th of March, 45 days after launch.
Even before launch, it was mockingly compared to Concord, another pointless. live service, content incomplete, competitive multiplayer shooter that only lived for two weeks.