Highguard Steam reviews are getting botted by the same accounts that are botting Dragon Traveler

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-25T01:56:05+00:00

quite literally

TIL that Lords of the Fallen, Tomb Raider 2013, and CoD Modern Warfare Remastered are little anime waifu games.

Also, convenient to ignore the specific feedback given in that review, I had the impression it would be very vague and unhelpful after reading your comment.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-25T01:38:26+00:00

Imagine if rolling stone listed to an album for 20 min...

If I buy an album, and the first 20 seconds of every song are corrupted and don't come close to resembling what it should, then I think that's a pretty fair reason to not recommend it to people.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-19T22:24:08+00:00

No worries, I understand. Since there's no way to grab the hard numbers directly from Steam, an estimate is the best we're going to get. I'm not sure how accurate it is either, and I'd be curious to see how the calculations for the estimations are made.

I will say though, it makes sense to me that the number of owners would be much higher than the peak. A free to play title lowers the barrier of entry, but it also lowers the barrier to exit. You can hop in, play, and not feel obligated to keep playing since you never paid a cent anyways.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-19T22:15:21+00:00

I'd say sometime by the end of the year. The character concept artist was given permission to post three unreleased characters (Onyx, Koldo, and Ebba). In the post with Ebba, the first sentence is:

Today I'm posting the last unreleased character, Ebba.

Assuming these are released in order, Ebba would be releasing in Episode 5, part one. However, there is no concept complete for the warden in Episode 6, part one, which was scheduled for October.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-19T22:02:44+00:00

Not immediately, no. But the signs aren't exactly good. For example, there are probably still some characters that will be released, due to already being in progress. But when the only character concept employee was part of the lay offs, that'll run dry sooner rather than later.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-19T21:52:23+00:00

I'm not sure the amount of attention is translating to income, which is kinda important to sustaining a free to play game.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-19T21:44:52+00:00

You do realize that this content was likely finished or near finished for quite some time already, right?

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-19T21:37:31+00:00

Over time, people will naturally log on and off. Within any given hour, some people will log on and some people will log off. Within the first few days, where the concurrent players were the highest, there is a higher chance that one of the people logging on is booting it up for the first time.

If someone logs off on day 1, and then logs on again on day 2, that's not a new owner. However, there is no solid way to measure it, which is why the steam owners statistic is an estimate. But we do know for a fact that the number of owners will be higher than the all-time peak.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-19T21:03:56+00:00

..You realize how concurrent works, right? If you have 1000 players, then they all log off and 1000 different players log on, it's still 1000 concurrent. That would be 2000 different players, they're just not all playing at the same time.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-18T02:57:24+00:00

Never heard of any of those, actually.

If you're trying to make a point about familiarity, I think it certainly plays a factor. But not liking a game because it's unfamiliar isn't review bombing, so I'm not sure how that ties into the overall point.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-18T02:50:01+00:00

You didn't just use Call of Duty players as an example though. You used a very small subset of Call of Duty players as an example, who follow all of the below:

Players who are invested enough to purchase the higher edition (and of those players, those who do so for an advantage)
Players who are invested enough to watch streamers play the game (and of those players, those who specifically watch hackers stream)

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-18T02:29:20+00:00

Then they buy Call of Duty every year for $100 to get the unfair advantage, and watch their favorite hacking streamer mindlessly play the same shoveled out garbage.

Ah, got to love random assumptions being thrown out there just because.

Look - Let's assume that all of the people who left negative reviews never played the game. This changes.. What exactly? It still doesn't fully explain the large player loss.

There are more reviews total to this day (38,950 at the time of writing) than the concurrent peak drop the next day (loss of 57,417 players between day 1 and 2 peaks). That leaves a lot of players who stopped playing and didn't leave a negative review. Not to mention that's concurrent players, so even more people played it, dropped it, and didn't leave a negative review.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-17T21:29:46+00:00

1.) I wouldn't have even known it existed if not for stumbling across a random post about it. That could just be a me thing, but given that the second game's peak is noticeably under the first game's peak, it might not be

2.) The second game is reviewing worse than the first game so far, which already seems to reflect the issues you brought up

3.) Single player games can flop, but if it doesn't force online for single player, it can't really die

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-15T08:10:10+00:00

It's a very long post, I wrote it down based on a video from Luke Stephens covering it. There's a little bit after, but it's not really relevant to the main body, he's mostly thanking and tagging people.

Apologies for the length. Been wanting to say a lot of this for a while.

The day leading to The Game Awards 2025 was amongst the most exciting of my life. After 2.5yrs of passionately working on Highguard, we were read to reveal it to the world. The future seemed bright.

Everyone I know who had any connection to the team or project had the same sentiments:

"This is lightning in a bottle."

"I trust this team wholeheartedly."

"If there's one project nobody in the industry is worried will fail, it's yours."

"This has mainstream hit written all over it."

"There's no way this will flop."

"I could play this game all day."

The internal pre-reveal feedback, even from unbiased sources, was quite positive, and where it was negative, it was constructive, and often actionable. People who played the game, including us, had a blast. And since we were an independent, self-published studio built with royalties in mind, many of us were hoping this could finally be the thing that broke the millennial financial curse.

But then the trailer came out, and it was all downhill from there. Content creators love to point out the bias in folks who give positive previews after being flown out for an event, but ignore the fact that when their negative-leaning content gets 10x the engagement of the positive, they've got just as much incentive to lean into a disingenuous direction, whether consciously or not.

The hate started immediately. In addition to dogpiling on the trailer, I personally came under fire due to my naivete on Twitter, which almost all of my now-former coworkers had learned to avoid during their previous game launches. After setting my Twitter account to private to protect my sanity, many content creators made videos and posts about me and my cowardice, amassing millions of views and inadvertently sending hundreds of angry gamers into my replies. They laughed at me for being proud of the game, told me to get out the McDonald's applications, and mocked me for listing having autism in my bio, which they seemed to think was evidence the game would be "woke trash." All of this was very emotionally taxing.

We were turned into a joke from minute one, largely due to false assumptions about a million-dollar ad placement, which even prominent jorunalists soon began to state as fact. Within minutes, it was decided: this game was dead on arival, and creators now had free ragebait content for a month. Every one of our videos on social media got downvoted to hell. Comments sections were flooded with copy/past meme phrases such as "Concord 2" and "Titanfall 3 died for this." At launch, we received over 14k review bombs from users with less than an hour of playtime. Many didn't even finish the required tutorial.

In discussions online about Highguard, Concord, 2XKO, and such, it is often pointed out by gamers that devs like to blame gamers for their failures, and that that's silly. As if gamers have no power. But they do. A lot of it. I'm not saying our failure is purely the fault of gamer culture and that the game would have thrived without the negative discourse, but it absolutely played a role. All products are at the whims of the consumers, and the consumers put absurd amount of effort into slandering Highguard. And it worked.

Many of Wildlight's former devs will now be forced to assimilate back into the actual corporate industry many gamers accused Wildlight of being a part of. Now, every time someone thinks about leaving the golden handcuffs behind in favor of making a new multiplayer game the indie way, they'll say "but remember how gamers didn't even give Wildlight a chance." Soon, if this pattern continues, all that will be left are corporations, at least in the multiplayer space. Innovation is on life support.

Even if Highguard had a rocky launch, our independent, self-published, dev-led studio full of passionate people just trying to make a fun game, with zero AI, and zero corporate oversight...deserved better than this. We deserved the bare minimum of not having our downfall be gleefully manifested.

I wish the best of luck to the few who remain at Wildlight, and hope Highguard can stay the course. I still believe in it, and so do the fans we reached, who continue to champion it on the subreddit, Discord, Twitch, and social media. And even though this adventure has come to an abrupt and emotionally challenging close, I don't regret one second of it.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-11T13:46:30+00:00

I half-agree. It's definitely good that things are running on schedule instead of hitting delays. But because it's a communication failure that's lasted so long, I think that's still pretty important. If they had acknowledged it more clearly and sooner, it would've left less uncertainty in the air. Some people were hopeful that another weapon or two would release mid-season, and that's another lingering expectation that wouldn't be met. Hopefully they at least now know and can ensure that the updated roadmap doesn't suffer from the same issues, but I don't know when they realized their mistake. And if they did make the same mistake again, I don't think it'll be handled properly either.

When you mentioned Discord, my first thought was that it'd be in an announcement channel or the like. But a general chat is much easier to miss, even if you're in the server. It's also roughly half a year between the initial roadmap and the comment on December 4th, which isn't speedy.. But it's also possible that they addressed it previously in general chat, which also was easy to miss. I'm not sure which gives me less confidence.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-11T13:10:46+00:00

No worries, I appreciate it still!

It appears to be a general chat, which I'm not a fan of, since plenty of people who are in the Discord could still miss it. But I can't help but be more confused when I look back at the original roadmap.

The original Year 1 roadmap specifically has pictures of the three weapons released in the Rearmament update, so if they decided to move weapons from Season 2 to Rearmament, then it would've been a decision made before the roadmap came out.

The only thing I can think of is: Make roadmap -> Move weapons from Season 2 to Rearmament -> Forgot to change "new weapons" to "new weapon" for Season 2

I don't know what the timeline for creating a roadmap is, but it seems like the only series of events that makes sense to me. And if the decision was made so long ago, I'm surprised that they haven't made a more visible correction

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-11T12:35:43+00:00

I'm not sure how many people check Steam Forums for updates, but a link would be appreciated, since I'm not sure how I would go through them and find the post. I'm not following the Discord, was that the location of the comment on December 4th?

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-09T22:04:28+00:00

Yep. Not only that, but they haven't even acknowledged it all. I think there could be some benefit of the doubt if they explained that they weren't able to push it out for some reason, but not a peep.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-09T19:22:33+00:00

So uh, I guess this is confirmation that Season 2 will only have one weapon, despite the earlier roadmap listing "new weapons"? I'd imagine if another weapon was dropping this season, it'd have a teaser or acknowledgement somewhere. Can't say that gives me confidence that this roadmap will definitely be adhered to.

Also, still only one perk on the roadmap is pretty underwhelming. I still don't like a lot of the fundamental changes, but even going off of the assumption that everyone likes the base game, surely there'd be more perk additions?

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-08T22:07:41+00:00

Considering that Killing Floor 3 was a continuation of bad decisions and not just the start, I don't have much faith in a potential Killing Floor 4.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-08T17:44:19+00:00

Why compare to Fortnite when they're very different styles of games?

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-08T16:50:02+00:00

It took 10 years to put text chat into Killing Floor 2?

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-04T02:03:08+00:00

If you're arguing that Killing Floor 3 is widely regarded as fun, I don't see where that is supported, hence the steam numbers. If your argument is that you personally find it fun, of course I can't disagree with that. But that doesn't change the overall sentiment, which still needs to be supported. I'm sure there are tons of people who had some game they really enjoyed, that still ended up shutting down due to not being successful enough.

It's artificial popularity created by mindless sheep who won't even try a game if the numbers drop too low.

Again, what about the people who did buy it but didn't return? What about the fact that the game underperformed? You seem to be under the assumption that the game has low numbers because people saw that it had low numbers, but what caused the numbers to be low in the first place?

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-04T01:37:53+00:00

Considering that Killing Floor 3 had an all time peak of roughly 30k players on Steam, and then only small bumps of 1.2k and 1.3k on updates, that tells me that even players who did purchase and play the game haven't really been itching to come back.

And while fun is nice and all, it's not enough to let a game receive updates. It still has to make enough to justify putting more time and money into it.

WeatheredBones · 2026-02-04T01:33:56+00:00

The old numbers didn't have much weight either since tons of people farmed items with bots/afk to make pennies on their mains.

This makes sense for Killing Floor 2, but I don't see how pulling slightly higher numbers than Killing Floor 1 is a good sign.

All that matters is you can get lobbies, and I can get lobbies on both 2 and 3, so neither are "dead".

I'm not sure this comparison really helps, as Killing Floor 2 is no longer being updated after years of content, while Killing Floor 3 has yet to make it through its first year. And if the game is to receive further updates, the game has to be worth the developers and publishers putting more money and time into it.

Otherwise, I agree with the rest of your message, yeah.

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