I believe it’s not about whether the game is actually any good or not. It’s about what Highguard represents.
Let’s be honest, hero shooter isn’t an oversaturated genre in any sense. Upon looking up what hero shooters are available right now I managed to find around five of them: Overwatch 2, Fragpunk, Valorant, Apex Legends, Paladins. If Highguard survives it will be the sixth.
That number is a joke compared to boomer shooters (which itself I’d argue isn’t oversaturated in the first place) and downright sad compared to metroidvanias or deckbuilders. Don’t even think about incrementals. But those releases don’t get this near unanimous levels of animosity from the community.
The fact is liveservice games completely lost any goodwill they once might have had. 90% of the time nobody is excited when a new one is announced because almost nobody respects this genre. It’s primarily seen as a soulless, corporate product made for maximum profit potential, and nine times out of ten that is true. Even if you give one a shot it can disappear a few years later (or two weeks in case of Concord), so all the money and time you’ve invested is down the drain. It’s no wonder people look at this game and immediately start thinking about the apology tweet and the end of service announcement.
I believe if hero shooter devs want to be taken seriously by the community they need to adopt the Xonotic model. Xonotic is a community developed open source arena shooter. In Xonotic hosting and moderating the servers is the community’s job. This immediately solves everything and is the reason a game with a playerbase measured in dozens can be sustained with effectively zero monetization. Translating this to a commerical title can be quite tricky but I think it has great potential.
And yet gacha liveservice shit reskins some fantasy into SF or the other way around every few weeks and makes good money.
Since almost 100k people tried it on Steam at launch and the next day it’s a ghost town, I’d say it’s very much whether the game is good or not. And 3 vs 3 on huge maps, with prefight busywork that feels like it could be skipped with no loss, on UE5 (which might be a good engine, but from high-end graphics games I learned to expect smeary upscaled shit with lumen painting everything grainy and blurry, input lag badly disguised with motion blur, etc.). Also, they lost a sizeable chunk of players to their TPM+secure boot requirements, even people who don’t know computers realized it means ad-serving fucking corpos can trust your secure computer, not you yourself.