Highguard: A Sad Reflection of Gaming Discourse

Other than the reveal of Mega Man Dual Override, I didn’t find much too noteworthy within 2025’s The Game Awards. I’m not saying that to discredit Geoff Keighly; I understand that not every single year can be an absolute nonstop barrage of top tier announcements. When the final trailer for a game called “Highguard” started playing, I wasn’t really paying attention.

It took me a week to two to actually understand what was going on and why the internet reignited its seemingly eternal flame. It was another free-to-play hero shooter. I’m not trying to be a scathing cynic here, but it’s starting to get tiresome seeing countless studios fall for the free-to-play model. What I personally find the most offensive is the audacity of these studios to continue asking for way too much of a precious commodity- my time. Yes, there are tons of people who genuinely love hero shooters, battle royales, and extraction shooters. But even those gamers can only bounce between 1-2 of those games. Every game like Highguard attempts to say “Hey, forget those games and come to us!”. And more often than not, they have nothing truly special to back up this request. Even the reveal trailer says it’s a “New Breed of Shooter” while then showing us the most Chat-GPT looking characters and abilities straight out of Overwatch. For every Highguard there is a:

Concord

Skull and Bones

Babylon’s Fall

Lawbreakers

Crucible

Foamstars

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

XDefiant

Anthem

I say all of this because I do think there are valid reasons and arguments against a game like Highguard. And I do think gamers have every right to roll their eyes.

Trust me, my good friend and I have talked a lot of shit about Highguard in the past few weeks. But you know what neither have us done? We haven’t review bombed the game. We haven’t harassed the developers on social media. We haven’t started a hate campaign against the game.

Highguard is another sad realization that discourse around video games is beneath rock bottom.

It’s only human nature to occasionally root against something. You root against a certain sports team- sometimes adamantly. You root against an internet personality who you believe spouts hateful rhetoric. You root against your scumbag boss from getting a promotion at work. It’s an ugly side of humanity that peeks its ugly head out occasionally. But for the umpteenth time in the 2020’s, gamers have used a specific game to be nightmarishly evil online. Does anybody else remember how “Resident Evil fans” bullied Lily Gao (Ada Wongs VA) so badly that she had to take down her social media pages? Events like these happen so frequently that I don’t blame anybody for forgetting. Ten years ago, you would often see people saying they were tired of movies and television “spreading a message” (typically conservative-leaning people towards liberal-leaning writing). And now we’ve seen those people fighting fire with fire; people are using games and other media as excuses to let out their hatred.

In a non literary or thematic sense, video games are the deepest art form to me. They encapsulate visual art, music, writing, and concoct it all into something interactive. Not only are games such a creatively thriving industry, but also financially. It’s arguably the biggest entertainment industry on the planet. It’s a cultural titan that will continue to impact us and our loved ones until the end of time.

And instead of having millions of people online speaking about games at the deep level they deserve- we just see constant hatred. I genuinely respect every content creator I saw who downloaded Highguard and tried it out for a few hours. Anybody who review bombed the game without even trying it is an embarrassment to the hobby. I’m not saying that people should just consume any slop (internets favorite word currently) handed to them. But in the case of Highguard with a price tag of free, why not try it before passing judgement?

If anyone out there reading this was upset about Highguard or other recent AAA games to the point of arguing online, please- spread more love rather than hate. It’ll feel better. I promise.