Highguard Developers Had A Blind Spot To Respond Despite Rigorous Testing
Despite its prominent display at the 2025 end game awards, Highguard failed to impress the audience.
Perhaps the burnout of live service games; it’s been a rough year for them unless your name is Arc Raiders. Perhaps it’s the fact that the game felt incredibly incomplete despite skipping Early Access.
Whatever the reason, Highguard is a game that should have worked on paper. After all, developer Wildlight Entertainment had a talent pool, including people who worked on Apex Legends and Titanfall. People love those games, so surely they’ll love a superhero shooter that looks and feels like Respawn’s gameplay, right?
Geoff’s Hype Couldn’t Stop Highguard’s Demolition
Despite its prominent appearance at the Game Awards 2025, Highguard is laying off staff, with the game apparently shutting down after just a few weeks.
Well, that’s not at all how things turned out. As of today, Highguard is closing. It’s a shame because we liked what we saw before the game even started, there was a lot of buzz first. That’s not guaranteed to translate into success, though, and people move on quickly. It’s something Wildlight didn’t expect, however, as one developer recently explained.
Highguard Had Extensive NDA Testing, But Still Had Blind Spots
Josh Sobel, a former technical artist and rigger for Highguard, has commented on what he thinks happened at Highguard.
He expressed regret for his original comments, but made a good point:
In online discussions about Highguard, Concord, 2XKO, and the like, it’s often pointed out by gamers that the devs like to blame gamers for their failures, and that that’s stupid. As if gamers are powerless. But they do. A lot of it. I’m not saying that our failure is the fault of the culture of the players and that the game would have been successful without the bad talk, but he was completely involved. All products are available at the discretion of the consumers, and consumers make an unreasonable effort to slander Highguard. And it worked.
It’s easy to look at Highguard, the game that was slandered the second it was revealed, and fall into the trap of online collecting and not give the game a chance to succeed. It’s something Wildlight didn’t consider because of, as Sobel explains, the “relentlessly hostile response” from NDA reviewers.
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He clarifies that the idea of Wildlight simply patting itself on the back for making a good game is “absolutely false.” The team “tore the game to pieces,” suggesting a development cycle that was met with strong feedback and criticism. Yet despite all that internal feedback, what the team heard from players after the launch was “a curveball.”
It’s important to note that, unlike something like ARC Raiders or Marathon, there wasn’t a widespread Server Slam to deliver a massive public test of Highguard. Yes, they had their own internal and external teams of NDA testers, but those teams were always limited, so they had blind spots when the game launched.
Could Highguard be saved by some public tests or even an Early Access launch? It’s possible, but given what we’ve heard about Wildlight running out of time and money, I’m not sure
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