Destructoid Checkpoint: Heavy Lies The Crown

There are some odd stories in gaming this week, the kind of stories that only our modern era of gaming could provide. They all teach lessons, though. Like it’s okay to be excited about things even when others are not. And, it’s okay to find a little kindness within, even when others don’t.

The State of Play

I like it when the Big Three put on a showcase. While I never got to attend E3, I always felt the waves that it made in magazines or on the internet. Even though they have become very disjointed now, with the major console makers opting for their own events scattered throughout the year, I still get a little giddy at the idea that I’ll be introduced to something new that I will love. 

Key among the news dropped at the recent Sony State of Play was the remake of the original God of War Trilogy. I try not to be emotionally won over by nostalgia these days, but those games are true action classics, and while Kratos may have matured and grown up, there is a child within us all who has not. As much as I love what God of War has become, I am eager to get my hands on those games, although we can likely expect quite the wait for them to appear.

While we wait, though, we can engage with a pleasant surprise, as God of War: Sons of Sparta was shadow-dropped at State of Play. This platformer has strong Metroidvania vibes and covers the origin story of our favorite Angry Man, Kratos. 

I haven’t had time to get too deep into it just yet, but I have enjoyed the few hours I have put into it, and the shadow drop was a pleasant treat, frankly. More of that kind of nice surprise please, Sony.

Overwatch lives

Overwatch has always been a hugely interesting game to me. The characters were largely built to be engaging, interesting, and alluring, but the narrative campaign that would explore them never happened. Blizzard went out of its way to push the esports aspect, and many teams were foolish enough to buy in, but the game never really found the audience the company hoped would embrace it. 

Blizzard learned the hard way that you cannot force growth in the esports space, and it has to start as a grassroots effort. Although I would argue they had already learned that lesson with Heroes of the Storm. Maybe they just need to learn stuff twice to really have it sink in.

In 2022, Overwatch 2 launched, and it replaced the original, but it also didn’t offer enough to really feel like it was worth doing. It was considered by many to just be a move to push the playerbase into the free-to-play model. Marvel Rivals came out and landed with a bang that Overwatch could only dream of, hoovering up disenfranchised players and giving them somewhere they could get their tactically demanding, hero-based shooting fun on, but with a Marvel skin.

Now, Overwatch 2 is officially dead, Overwatch is back from the grave, and the game has managed, for now, to snatch back the crown from Marvel Rivals, if only for a minute. The developers seem to have figured out where they went wrong, as they hit a new all-time peak of 165K players on Steam, and more importantly, you can see 40K players drift away from Marvel Rivals that same day if you go and take a peek at SteamDB.

Players stolen are much better than players earned, I assume. 

Can Overwatch keep it up? Almost certainly not. As I type, they are enjoying a healthy 111K players in-game and have plans for a year-long narrative that will hopefully keep those players engaged. The problem is that, per the Steam reviews, there are as many annoyed players as newly engaged ones. Every change made invites one lost player back, but also seems to annoy an existing player. It’s a hard line to walk, so I shall watch with interest to see how Blizzard does over the coming months. 

The lowpoint of Highguard

Highguard has turned into another game that sputtered out before it really got moving. The industry has seen this happen a lot, but it always hurts a little bit to watch a game and fail, then see the dev team impacted by layoffs, which is exactly what happened with Highguard.

Some games seem to have enough runway to correct a failure to disconnect with games, No Man’s Sky being easily the most famous example, but that didn’t seem to be the case for Highguard. 

Josh Sobel, a tech artist and rigger who worked at Wildlight, the studio behind Highguard, made a very interesting post on Twitter. He was one of the staff affected by the layoffs, and broke down his thoughts on what it was like to work on Highguard, see it revealed, and then the impact of what happened after that. 

No matter what line you fall on with Highguard, it’s an interesting read, and perhaps a bit of a sad one, too. That said, I do feel making this post was a mistake. It is normally better to let yourself figure out your own mind and endure the tumultuous emotions that come with this kind of project falling apart so publicly. 

I hope that Josh and the rest of the team who were impacted by all this take some time to process their thoughts and feelings around how all this went down. 

Ultimately, the game pulled in 100K concurrent players, which most new launches would kill for, and those people didn’t find something that made them stay. I was one of those people, and the game simply wasn’t for me. 

One of the more interesting parts of Josh's post comes right at the start, where he describes how everyone he knew who had any connection to the team or project was really digging the game. One incredibly interesting example of feedback he gives is that someone seems to have said, “If there’s one project nobody in the industry is worried will fail, it’s yours.” That is just one example of the extreme positivity that Josh describes surrounding the game. 

I can’t comment on that, but to come full circle from my God of War lovefest earlier, during the Raising Kratos documentary that covered the making of God of War 2018, there is a portion where the developers, who are just about to unveil their new vision for Kratos to the world, and they have absolutely no idea how that game will be accepted by their audience. 

There is a genuine, palpable fear that people will not like it, and that it will be the end of the series. I can only imagine there is a similar feeling of pressure on all development teams when they are working on a game, perhaps with rare exceptions. I think it’s okay to offer a little kindness to people who find themselves in tough situations, be they in the gaming industry or not.

I was not a fan of Highguard, but I see little point in celebrating its failure, or the impact it will have had on the people who worked hard to make it. 

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Andrej Barovic has been playing Overwatch, and enjoying it. - “With the new update that dropped the “2” and introduced all sorts of fun mechanics, I had to come back and see if the game was still worth playing. And, sure enough, it was.”

Tiago Manuel is worried about Elder Scrolls 6 - “Skyrim lead developer Bruce Nesmith shared some harrowing thoughts regarding Morrowind with PressBoxPR. He claims fans only like it for nostalgia’s sake and wouldn’t enjoy playing it nowadays, for it is overcomplex and outdated. If Bethesda shares Nesmith’s idea, this doesn’t bode well for TES6.”

Scott Duwe has some thoughts on the whole Highguard thing - “After playing it at a preview event in Los Angeles the week before it launched, I thought it had awesome potential. Everyone else at the event agreed. We were put in a room to play for hours and interview developers, and we all felt that it was a unique title from experienced industry veterans that combined existing ideas into something new. It didn’t matter.”

And that’s it for this week.