This year’s final World Premiere at The Game Awards dropped harder than the two-week lifespan of Concord, with Geoff Keighley hyping the audience up for what could have beenTitanfall 3. Instead, we were served yet another Overwatch clone, Highguard, a hero shooter by the creators of Apex Legends and Titanfall. This isn’t to say the trailer looked awful or the gameplay looked weak. It’s all about what we expected, and what we got in no way satisfied those expectations.
Geoff Keighley claimed that the team at Wildlight Entertainment has been working on Highguard in secret, but it’s no wonder no one leaked it. The like-to-dislike ratio on the game’s reveal trailer should be a clear indicator that this wasn’t what gamers were hoping for. Memes and jokes about Elder Scrolls 6 or Half Life 3 aside, plenty of online users collectively agree that the game looks underwhelming, to say the least.
The heroes’ flashy magical powers, the environmental designs, and the horse riding look nice but are aggressively generic, to the point that people actively dislike the game already. “They could have put control, divinity or star wars at the end instead of this…” remarks a Redditor. “I feel like they would actually benefit more from not being a final reveal, now all publicity they have is people being pissed off,” adds another.
That said, Highguard is set to launch on January 26, 2026, with crossplay and cross-progression on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5. But unless this debut, free-to-play, PvP raid shooter is able to really prove itself as the “new breed” it so claims to be, all people will see is “Concord 2” upon its release. The market for hero shooters is already saturated enough, so these developers will really have to prove themselves upon this release, which is less than two months away.
To reiterate, it’s not just the game that’s the main issue; Highguard just objectively should not have been the last big reveal. As commenters put it, “Concord 2 has arrived,” and it is the “worst final announcement ever.” And as cringe as it is to say, one online user is right: “We got Concord 2 before GTA 6……”
