"Highguard Struggles to Win Over the Internet, Video Game Developers Come to Its Defense"

[kane_magus]

Full headline, due to the usual reasons: "'When Did It Become Trendy to Hate on a New Game?' — as Highguard Struggles to Win Over the Internet, Video Game Developers Come to Its Defense"

There are only two things I know about this game. One, this game apparently started getting shat upon from the first moment they showed it off at the Game Awards or whenever. Two, it is a "free-to-play 'PvP raid shooter.'" Of those two distinct facts that I know about this game, the latter one is the far bigger catalyst to my utter apathy toward this game, because I have great antipathy toward that particular type of video game, just in general. The only reason I'm even making a post about this game at all is because the former one is morbidly interesting to me.

What's really funny to me is that the three developers IGN is quoting here as defending this game are a veritable "Who's Who" of "says stupid things" types. They literally quoted irrelevant has-been Cliffy B of all people, for fuck's sake. I'm kind of surprised that they didn't scrape a quote from Tim Sweeney, given he's been on a real run recently of saying stupid things, though I do still have reason to add the "fuck epic games store" tag (i.e. the de facto "fuck epic" tag), given IGN found a different Epic head asshole from which to scrape a quote from 卐 for this thing.

(EDIT) The argument seems to be that Internet assholes are attacking the game's developers, rather than (just) the game itself. I haven't personally seen that myself, but then I haven't been looking for it, either, so I don't doubt it a bit. The Internet has a lot of assholes, after all, all of them constantly dumping shit on anything and anyone in spew range. However, what should be known by now is that trying to appeal to the humanity and empathy of Internet assholes and get them to stop being big meanies typically has the exact opposite effect than the one desired. That's just how Internet assholes function. Especially when the appeal apparently is "would you pwease think of the poor widdle video game devewopers." (/EDIT)

Anyway, I'll just leave this here:

Link to comic

Link to comic

Comments

[owsf2000]

Most of the comments I saw on steam were more of "Everything looks last gen." "Everything seems to be things stitched together from every other game in the genre, poorly." and "Poorly optimized for PC." etc. All of which are fair game crits as far as I'm concerned.

If the game doesn't run well, why should I care?

If the game is doing the same thing as other games already out, why should I switch?

If the game is substandard to other games (last gen), why should I play it?

Sounds like they really did get overhyped at those award things, and this is the fallout from that. You raise everyone's expectations and well... they expect more now.

For me this is a free to play, multiplayer game. And that alone makes me shitlist the game. Quietly shitlist it mind you. I'll just put it on ignore and go back to forgetting about it.

The thing about freebie online games is that they need to make money. And if they're not expecting a fair price up front, then they're definitely milking players in some other way. I just avoid that like I do all mobile games.

Second they have anti-cheat software that gets installed alongside it. That basically amounts to spyware imo. I instantly ignore any game that includes shit like that as I'll count it on par with aggressive DRM. This doesn't mean I'm pro-cheater, it means do your anticheating properly. I'd probably be less opposed to this if some anticheat programs weren't caught trying to read people's email as part of their functions.

So yeah I can safely go back to ignoring this thing. It's not a type of game I care about anyway though so it'd be an uphill battle trying to win me over, and they're just tumbling down the hill face first.

[kane_magus]

Yeah, the game itself doesn't interest me in the slightest. It didn't interest me any more back when it was "Concord" than it does now when it's "Highguard" or whatever. It's the same exact shit all over again. I will also forget about this game as completely as I can, once the current brouhaha fades away, except perhaps to reference it whenever the next inevitable brouhaha bubbles up in the future.

The "interesting" part of this story, at least for me, was these blowhard, bonehead game devs who had nothing to do with this game rushing to the game's defense and circling the wagons, trying to frame it as some kind of monolithic "us vs them" thing or whatever asinine, disingenuous horseshit. It's something that has become increasingly common over the past decade or so, i.e. the modern video game industry (including video game "journalists") turning against and attempting to chastise its consumer base as if they were belligerent children. When it was stupid dumbfuckery like Gamergate, the mindset was justified, because fuck Gamergate forever. But the modern video game industry seems to have taken that as a lesson that they should always turn against and blame their consumer base whenever something "bad" happens. Here, for instance, it's a much less justified response. Here, it's just a case of yet another lame, shitty, cookie cutter clone "GaaS" game, to which gamers in general finally seem to be starting to react appropriately[1] (discounting any ostensible personal attacks against devs). The modern video game industry doesn't like that, though, because the modern video game industry would prefer to have all games become "GaaS" games if they could get away with it.

[1] - Better late than never, I guess.