The game was not initially supposed to look like it does today
The article published on Bloomberg firstly returns to the very announcement of Highguard during the Game Awards, which was not received with much excitement, as reported by an ex-Wildlight employee. If, from there, the studio were to reassure, its leaders encouraged radio silence among employeesindicating that the game would speak for itself upon release. And everything didn’t go as planned.
Jason Schreier goes behind the scenes of development, describing a fairly healthy atmosphere at Wildlight, apart from these last two months. Initially, the studio wanted to avoid the Battle Royale market, and began drawing inspiration from games like Rust. But two years later, things weren’t falling into place, because the team mainly wanted to build a competitive FPS. Some things still remained, and it was in January 2024 that the game really became the Highguard that we know. The desire to produce a solo campaign was definitely present in the team, made up of many former artists who had worked on Titanfallbut the idea did not go through with it.
The absence of public tests in question
For two years, the studio tested its game internally and externally, notably with members of TiMi Studio (now closed), a studio owned by Tencent, the latter having financed part of the project. The results were encouraging, but one problem remained: without communication on the microphone, the games were significantly more confusing and less pleasant..
The fact that the game not being able to access a real beta to the public proved to be problematic for the teams. Many people have been pushing for the game to be revealed early for this, given that recent betas like those for Battlefield 6 And ARC Raiders changed everything for these games. The studio’s management, however, remained firm in its position, and the term hubris often came up when describing the leaders, who thought they were emulating the success ofApex Legends in a market that is totally different in 2026.
Tencent withdraws its marbles
Today, the game is struggling to attract more than a few hundred daily players on Steam, and the studio laid off nearly 100 people. And this after assuring that he did not need the game to obtain big numbers, giving hope to employees that their jobs would be saved. The journalist specifies that things changed when Tencent withdrew its funding after the game’s launch, probably because it had not reached the requested milestones.
Jason Schreier states that Wildlight would now consist of around twenty people to keep the game alivethus leaving little hope for a real revival.
Highguard is still available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series free-to-play. For how much longer, who knows.