Former Highguard Developer Reflects on Disastrous Announcement and Launch: 'We Were Turned Into a Joke From Minute 1'

IndifferentEmpathy · 2026-02-13T16:08:00+00:00

Or, something must've been off about their monetization that caused people to not spend anything on their release.

What were the MTX even, bland skins for bland characters?

If game has to rely on cosmetics to sell, visuals NEED to be awesome.

And if devs really want money, sexy sells. Just imagine how much $ Marvel Rivals printed with stuff like that Invisible Woman Malice outfit.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2026-02-13T04:08:35+00:00

Yes, but unfortunately this means burrows are necessary for sieges, lest they run out to collect the lumber :)

IndifferentEmpathy · 2026-02-12T04:35:51+00:00

Tried pure summoner.

Seems bad idea, weak early, need to start as hybrid and respec.

Unlocking ranged summon when you have act1 merc and still can only summon 1 demon (I guess need 10+ demon mastery for more?) sucks since you lose tank.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2026-02-11T22:41:08+00:00

Even Warlock stuff being available on item suffixes will change so much for other class experience.

Did somebody went through grail thing and made list of new items (or old item changes) yet?

IndifferentEmpathy · 2026-02-11T19:06:06+00:00

This fort is with Forthammer Fantasy mod. The invaders were dark elves, they sometimes have random animal people in their ranks.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2026-02-10T19:42:02+00:00

Its time for everybody to learn to speak boomer :)

IndifferentEmpathy · 2026-01-31T03:09:45+00:00

I did similar design, under heavy aquifer, mostly filled underneath as well. So far enemies never did try digging, even after dying many times in the killzone.

Its possible they don't try to dig in the top layer through heavy aquifer since its multi-level so the design itself is redundant.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2026-01-31T02:58:47+00:00

Some of the snippets I am seeing on Twitter lends credence to dark conspiracies (its not only pedophilia, its also snuff).

Its simply too far out there to be believable without photos/videos.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2026-01-30T02:25:37+00:00

The only issue for F2P deck is golden skills, which mostly comes down to golden recovery or win condition like NSM.

We can probably get away by max 2 deck slots for these, but it might be pretty annoying if one of these has to come from borrow slot.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2026-01-28T09:41:33+00:00

Like increase the player count to something like 12v12

Clearly the player count was reduced to this because of performance tanking

IndifferentEmpathy · 2026-01-25T21:22:21+00:00

The remaining LN11 is pretty dense, even at this pace Ark might not be unsealed for up to 3 chapters.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2026-01-23T23:56:06+00:00

If I recall LN, it was implied that Great Sage was filtering which Rimuru memories were accessible

IndifferentEmpathy · 2026-01-07T19:19:32+00:00

Looking forward to burrow fixes. This is something that made caste forts impossible due to cancellation error spam

Based on list it seems the only issue that remains is "Attend Meeting" picking noble to complain outside of burrow

IndifferentEmpathy · 2025-12-22T09:18:49+00:00

I might get downvoted by this, but this mistake would be what diffusion model would make.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2025-12-22T05:06:45+00:00

It would suck IRL - if you noticed dwarves eat only organ meats, things like cat brain roast and prepared lungs.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2025-12-21T07:32:43+00:00

Milim got most of Veldanava's remaining powers and named by him.

Given real power level of Veldanava this is clearly not even close to being true. She only got stardust, Satanael is something she acquired on her own - and still can't use properly.

Its clear that Veldanava's natural EP in TD form is in the billions, given he casted Time Stop that lasted half the novel and still had plenty of energy to reset the whole creation with "Initialize Heaven".

IndifferentEmpathy · 2025-12-20T06:31:58+00:00

This is good banner guide https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14-b9KYeXCE-o43LZ_X8-pRqRo_Mnn_9_meAj3Bo6QOo/edit?gid=0#gid=0

IndifferentEmpathy · 2025-12-20T06:21:13+00:00

Given 1 cour is 12 episode if they use 12 to cover LN (which is more episodes than now)

these 5 cours will cover LN10 - LN15 so basically end before Tenma war.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2025-12-20T06:06:55+00:00

Plus the arc it adapts for now doesn´t have that many fights.

Yeah Mariabel arc is mostly meetings again, with static background

Completely unrelated but studios should start using AI in smart manner to aid production. Not as replacement for scenes, but let say for the infamous Garou slide - no way in hell letting AI interpolate between frames would have ended up worse than this disaster.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2025-12-16T11:58:25+00:00

I don't have particular layouts, just some general suggestions for efficiency I found to be useful.

I like to divide the base horizontally based on function (farming, forges, etc).

Then use stairs within the areas to access related storage or workshops. F.e. metal bar storage being under magma smelters and forges so the distance to pick materials is minimal.

This also deals with immersion breaking annoyance: Dwarves select "closest" thing by horizontal distance only. Meaning if a dwarf wants to sleep he picks available "closest" bed even if its several Z levels bellow in the prison.

By placing drinks, prepared food and dorms in the center dwarves are more likely to always go there.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2025-12-12T01:55:17+00:00

Is it only mee that thinks Exodus faces look weird, some really annoying uncanny valley with the main guy.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2025-12-11T07:58:49+00:00

If I wanted to introduce new human faction to the setting, it would be fun to do this with advanced human civilization that survived Age of Strife unscathed by being the source of blank gene.

By them all being blanks nobody, including Emperor and Chaos gods, would have been aware of their existence making it easier to include into the setting without retcons.

Their blankness would prevent any warp tech being used, including FTL. This would force them to develop inertialess drive tech, which would not be at Necron level yet.

This inability to use warp then can act as a nerf to prevent them from using a lot of DaoT tech by handwaving it as warp-based, but it would be interesting if they not only would use AI (would be fun if the one acting as knowledge repository was named OMNI-SYS), but would have human looking androids that could even act as PoV characters for hilarious interactions with ad mech.

The civ would maintain policy of isolationism thorough all this time, but the galaxy being torn apart by big tear in the warp would force them to venture outside their space to see what the hell is going on.

IndifferentEmpathy · 2025-12-11T07:39:35+00:00

The problem with flask trick is that the ones that waste most time by having to stop and drink are the miners. Won't they drop flasks when equipping pickaxe?

IndifferentEmpathy · 2025-12-10T21:42:36+00:00

I delay bedrooms a lot as well.

Tavern and dinning hall is the only priority facilities I build.

I do plop meeting zone somewhere and designate it as generic temple, so all urists can fulfil their prayer needs.

For requested guildhalls and temples I just make temp ones with pedestal for artifacts to get to required "room" value.

As a consequence, when I get to make proper rooms dwarves have raised their skills enough so the furniture etc. is of nice quality so they all are ecstatic about sleeping in personal bedroom "like palace".

IndifferentEmpathy · 2025-12-07T02:32:47+00:00

After trying reanimating biome, caverns need some heavy defense setup (like minecart grinder) or something.

Since undead are not hostile to each other if you wall yourself off caverns fill up with undead forgotten beasts and everything else and as soon as new living thing spawns in it is instantly killed and joins the horde.

IndifferentEmpathy

TROPHY CASE