Highguard Has Made Some People Unhinged But That Doesn’t Mean The Game Shouldn’t Be Criticized

The launch of Highguard this week has reignited a debate around good manners. Over a hundred people worked for several years on a project they were passionate about. Instead of everyone giving it a fair shake and casually talking about what they did or didn’t like about it, the conversation around the new multiplayer shooter was quickly subsumed by a torrent of knee-jerk negativity. Social media is full of people dunking on the game for clout and Steam reviews are full of users who barely touched it on PC before rushing to grade it almost entirely based on hardware performance.

It’s the culmination of an increasingly fractured online ecosystem whose only unifying forces are algorithms that reward rage-bait and endless free content that incentivizes harsh snap judgements in order to sort through it all. If you’re not first, you’re last. If you’re not the best, who cares? The swift, loud, and in many cases overly toxic reaction to Highguard has some developers concerned, disgusted, and confused.

“I don’t like people shitting on things others have created,” Baldur’s Gate 3 director and Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke wrote on X last night. He spent most of his short “soapbox” speech talking about game reviews, which seem completely tangential to what’s going on with Highguard at the moment. He wants them to be less mean and personal; most fans wants them to feel less inflated and overly deferential to the publishers behind the product. But importantly, almost no one has actually even reviewed Highguard yet. Maybe we wait for it to get a Metacritic score before we start assigning one to all of its critics, another one of Vincke’s suggestions.

I don’t like people shitting on things others have created. Putting something out into the world makes you vulnerable, and that alone deserves respect, even if you dislike the creation. It’s easy to destroy things, it’s a lot harder to build them. The best critics understand…

— Swen Vincke @where? (@LarAtLarian) January 27, 2026

Nevertheless, the veteran RPG maker ended with a call for more civility. “It’s been on my mind for a while and just opening my feed today just pushed it all to the surface,” he wrote. “Think of the time you had to recite something in front of the class and how nervous you were. And how much any negative comment hurt. Be nice to one another, be nice to the people creating stuff to entertain you. Treat them like you would like to be treated if you made something.”

Vincke wasn’t the only one ruffled. “When did it become trendy to hate on a new game?” wrote Cliff Bleszinski on X. “Been seeing it more and more in recent years. It’s exhausting.” Epic Games co-founder Mark Reign quoted-tweeted him: “It’s downright horrible. Especially a FREE game from a new studio. Just so sad. This is a hobby for people, they should approach with joy not hatred.”

Remedy Entertainment Communications Director Thomas Puha was disheartened by how player counts have become weaponized against games in recent years. “Tired of seeing headlines of how many players Highguard has lost,” he posted. “Like, sure, you can argue that’s putting facts out there, but I cant escape the feeling there’s just this ‘celebration’ of a game doing badly and just putting out negative headlines for the sake of it. Shouldn’t us game devs even try?”

Another hero shooter meltdown

We could try to psychoanalyze why the online gamer id has latched onto these narratives so zealously rather than just, you know, play the games and enjoy them or move on. Part of it is no doubt an ongoing backlash against the very concept of live-service games. Despite being far and away the most played and profitable genre, there’s a certain type of player that resents the gravity well they’ve created. For one swath of YouTube culture war peddlers, Concord‘s failure was celebrated as a defeat for progressive values in the marketplace. But for others it became symbolic vindication that all of these companies pumping resources into microtransaction casinos were idiots to do so.

Perhaps they’re simply exhausted with the modern live-service game trying to take over their life and their wallet. Once upon a time, the big scandal was publishers using sticks (single-use multiplayer codes) and carrots (bonus DLC) to get people to stop buying used games. Now the sale of most games is inconsequential. The real bucks are made in the in-game shop and the only way to keep making them is to keep people playing as much as possible. For fans of forever games who love hanging out with their friends in them, no harm done. For someone who doesn’t want their hobby to become like a second job, it’s easy to see where burnout and backlash might ensue.

It does not help that Highguard, despite being inspired by games like Rust, sounds like a knock-off of Overwatch and includes some very generic-looking characters to boot. Made by some of the leads on Apex Legends, the contrast between the launches of those two multiplayer games shows not just a possible increase in live-service fatigue in the intervening years but also the decay of the wider ecosystem where all of those issues get hashed out. “Covid transformed social media into an endless, awful conversation; once you pop, the horrors never stop,” writes Nathan Grayson at Aftermath. He adds, “Recent years have only worsened this dynamic, with short-form video content taking over as the predominant mode of expression and giving rise to a generation of caustic clip farmers who yank at the udder of any perceived drama of the week until it’s chafed and bone dry. Then they move onto the next thing and deploy the same playbook again.”

In this milieu of brainrot it’s harder than ever, but also more urgent, to separate bad-faith trolling, drama-farming, and review-bombing campaigns from genuine dislike and revulsion when a game sucks or, more often, just doesn’t have the juice. “Let people fucking hate shit,” Giant Bomb co-founder Jeff Gerstmann recently joked on his podcast. “Let people be fucking people! Grow up. It’s okay to criticize things that are fucking dumb.” It was in response to someone calling him out for making fun of people with glass-case gaming PCs that let you see inside the rig, but it applies just as much to an ambient strain in gaming discourse that would prefer people with nothing nice to say to say nothing at all.

The breakdown of the internet has only made criticism more important, not less, and raised the stakes for doing so responsibly and honestly. That requires an open mind, a generous spirit, and an unflinching commitment to saying what you mean and meaning what you say. Also avoiding Twitter and every other irradiated social media platform as much as humanly possible.