Ever since last month’s presentation of The Game Awards, a lot of attention has been placed on Highguard, the upcoming live-service hero shooter, that had the unfortunate luck of being the “final” announcement in a show that saw the return of Mega Man, a new Casey Hudson-led Star Wars title and the Divinity reveal.
Its studio’s radio silence in the time since the reveal hasn’t helped things, even though it was later reported that Highguard did not actually pay to be the “final” announcement.
It’s Good That No One Is Talking About Highguard
No news is good news.
However, as one sleuthy gamer found out, Highguard isn’t alone in being a “disappointing” final announcement at the annual year-end award show. In fact, historically speaking, the final announcement at The Game Awards has been pretty mediocre.
Once You Look At These Titles, Highguard Deserves None Of The Backlash
Over on Reddit, one user compiled the final announcements for each of the last 10 editions of The Game Awards, and outside a few rare instances, it’s a rather disappointing bunch.
Over the past decade, here’s the last thing revealed:
- 2025 — Highguard
- 2024 — Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet
- 2023 — Monster Hunter Wilds
- 2022 — Final Fantasy 16 release date trailer
- 2021 — The Matrix Awakens: Unreal Engine tech demo
- 2020 — Mass Effect
- 2019 — Fast & Furious Crossroads
- 2018 — Dead by Daylight DLC
- 2017 — Metro Exodus
- 2016 — Mass Effect Andromeda
- 2015 — The Walking Dead: Michonne
The Walking Dead: Michonne experience hit right when Telltale fatigue was at an all-time high, and wasn’t very well-received to boot. Mass Effect Andromeda was heavily criticized at launch and sits at a 5.1 user score on Metacritic.
Metro Exodus is a great game, actually, but certainly not “final game” worthy, especially when Breath of the Wild’s DLC and Death Stranding both had trailers. DLC for a live-service multiplayer game isn’t exactly “Wow,” either.
Where things really get interesting is 2019 with Fast & Furious Crossroads, a now-delisted title that has a 35 critic score on Metacritic. We’ve yet to see anything substantial from the next Mass Effect, and like Fast & Furious before it, The Matrix demo no longer exists. It was also a giant advertisement for both a bad Matrix movie and Unreal.
While we’ll likely be waiting a while for The Heretic Prophet, FF 16 was exquisite and MH Wilds was solid at launch. That leaves Highguard as our most recent announcement and one with the most ridicule.
We’ll let you ultimately be the judge when it comes to things, but if you ask me, more than half the announcements have not been good. It makes the Highguard situation that much more baffling. The game can look uninteresting, sure, but for so many to pretend that the “final” spot is some yearly game-changer is simply unfounded.
- Released
-
January 26, 2026
- Developer(s)
-
Wildlight Entertainment
- Publisher(s)
-
Wildlight Entertainment
- Multiplayer
-
Online Multiplayer
- Cross-Platform Play
-
Full
