Screyer investigated the reasons for Highguard's failure

It’s encouraging that even today some gaming journalists still do their work. Recently, Jason Schreier published an article about the results of his investigation into Wildlight Entertainment, which recently released the heroic online action game Highguard.

Schreier investigated this project due to its loud failure. The announcement at The Game Awards added to its notoriety. The video shown at the end of the ceremony was immediately bombarded with dislikes and humiliating comments. The project was also referred to as a sequel to Concord.

However, the fate of "Concord" was not fully repeated by the game. At launch on January 26, it reached nearly 100,000 online players, and despite a rapid drop in that number (currently only 540 people are playing it), Highguard has not been closed a month later.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the project was a failure, and this is not only due to "hatred" but also because the game itself turned out to be largely unfinished at launch and, in many ways, simply derivative - the character design, for example, may not have reached the level of Concord, but it was also unremarkable.

So what were the reasons for such obvious mistakes in development? In an interview with Schreier, Wildlight co-founder Dusty Welch explained that the company, founded in 2021 by former Respawn Entertainment members, wanted to create their own Apex Legends. Both in terms of popularity and profitability—many were very unhappy that a significant portion of the profits from the "battle royale in the Titanfall universe" was going to EA.

As for the genre of the future hit, the team initially wanted to develop a survival game similar to Rust. That is, a game where players needed to gather resources, build a base, monitor the health of their characters, and gradually transform their group of survivors from ragtag to a serious force, at which point they could go out and fight enemies.

As you can understand, such gameplay does not mesh well with the idea of dynamic and epic action, but the developers (at least initially) hoped they could come up with something—after all, among them were those who created the mega-popular Apex Legends and the cult classic Titanfall. But by 2023, it became clear that making a survival game focused on competition was not going to work.

When everyone realized that stretching a toad over a globe wouldn’t work, it was decided to discard a large portion of the survival elements and focus on a dynamic shooter/action game. Over the next two years, the studio experimented with different ideas and match formats—at one point, there was a variant with four squads of three.

Eventually, the developers settled on three-on-three battles, base strengthening, and everything that was present at the release in early 2026. After that, they planned a classic "live service" model, where updates, new content, and more would be regularly released. Naturally, if players were not satisfied with something, it was expected that everything would be quickly fixed according to the feedback.

And here, in fact, was the first mistake. According to the developers, they tested the game quite a lot before release, but all testers were given explanations of the mechanics and other details during the game. Naturally, such an experience is vastly different from the impression when you simply enter a game unprepared. The company decided not to conduct public tests, where a bunch of newcomers would play without outside help, in order to create intrigue.

In general, much was hidden from gamers. For example, the funding from Tencent. Instead, they presented Wildlight as an independent company, which many sympathize with now. In itself, this might not have been a big problem, but after the wave of negativity and the rapid decline in online players, the Chinese holding company ceased funding, and on February 11, the studio, stripped of financial investments, was forced to lay off a significant portion of its team (before layoffs, over 100 people worked there; now, fewer than 20).

As a result, the future of Highguard, which up until the announcement at TGA the developers had seen in exclusively rosy tones, is now at best in question. At worst, the game will simply be shut down without adding anything that the developers dreamed of (including a story campaign).

But on the other hand—could one expect anything different from a game that had nothing "engaging," and whose gameplay was quite unintuitive and required hints from developers? In conversations with Schreier, former employees talk about the "arrogance" of the management, who believed that the success of past projects meant they could not be wrong in their vision. However, couldn’t the regular employees have informed them if they saw that the project lacked uniqueness? Or did hired (and subsequently fired) workers not understand what they were doing and why?