‘I honestly thought Highguard looked pretty good’ — Gears of War creator laments internet culture where it’s ‘cool to hate’ new games
- Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski said, “It’s not cool to like something” anymore in a recent Facebook post
- He thinks players’ “minds are made up” before a game is even out, with some titles falling victim ot “dogpiling”
- He listed Highguard and the upcoming Horizon Hunters Gathering as examples
Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski has lamented the current online culture where players’ “minds are made up” before a game is even out, thanks to the “dogpiling” of certain titles like Concord, Highguard, and the upcoming Horizon Hunters Gathering.
In a recent Facebook post, Bleszinski, who was lead designer of the first three Gears of War games, said that he had been “sucked into the rabbit hole of takes on Concord‘s failure” while browsing YouTube.
A live-service hero arena shooter, Concord launched in 2024 and was an unprecedented flop. Its servers were shut down after just two weeks thanks to catastrophically low sales, with the few buyers refunded. Sony shut down its developer, Firewalk Studios, the next month.
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Bleszinski wrote that there is “no lack of videos trying to pin the blame on a variety of factors” like “hero shooter fatigue, ugly character designs, timing, long dev cycle.” This apparently led him to videos about the subsequent failure of Highguard, a free-to-play hero shooter that came out earlier this year and was shut down after just 45 days, having struggled to maintain a player base.
He argued that “gamers glommed onto” Highguard, branding it “the next Concord” before it had even come out. “I honestly thought Highguard looked pretty good,” he continued, though he admits he was skeptical whether it had a strong enough unique selling point to succeed.
“Betting on ‘well now you ride a horse’ as a unique selling point for a title didn’t make a lot of sense to me, just like ‘well you fight in low gravity’ wasn’t enough for LawBreakers,” he said, referring to the unsuccessful sci-fi hero shooter he himself directed that released in 2017 and shut down a little over a year later.
“In some of these hit piece videos I kept seeing glimpses of a really cool-looking title that I couldn’t pin down until I located it,” he added. The game in question was Horizon Hunters Gathering, an upcoming co-op Horizon Zero Dawn spinoff.
“I loved Horizon and I thought this looked really compelling; I dug the art style and a PvE game in that world seems like a good fit,” he wrote. “And then I read the comments. […] It was a nonstop barrage of wanting to hate something long before it even hit.”
He added: “The new world order we live in is one of ‘didn’t have a chance before it even came out’ – minds are made up before the title even ships and folks get a chance to play it and decide for themselves. The dogpiling is real. I can’t imagine being a dev and seeing this.”
To wrap up, he stated: “I get it. It’s not cool to like something. And, if something becomes loved, it then becomes cool to hate it.” He also questioned how this situation came about, though he didn’t offer any definitive conclusion.
You might argue that titles like Highguard failed to compete in a crowded market due to a lack of quality, though I think it’s still easy to see what Bleszinski is talking about. Upcoming games, particularly new live-service titles, often face a barrage of negative online sentiment on platforms like X and YouTube, which threatens to dominate the conversation surrounding them in the build-up to launch.
Whether the endless videos lambasting Horizon Hunters Gathering will dramatically affect the sales of the game is to be seen when it launches for PlayStation 5 and PC in the future.
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