Highguard developer Wildlight Entertainment has revealed it originally planned to shadow-drop its free-to-play “raid shooter,” until host Geoff Keighley offered to highlight it as the final reveal of 2025’s The Game Awards instead.
In an interview with GameSpot, studio cofounder and game director Dusty Welch said the plan was always for Highguard to be a “quiet shadow-drop.” It’s a strategy that worked well for Apex Legends, the popular free-to-play battle royale that many of the Highguard team at Wildlight previously worked on, he said.
That was the plan, at least until Keighley told Wildlight he loved the game and had an idea. He wanted to highlight the free-to-play shooter from an independent studio as part of the show, according to Welch.
“He came into the studio and played the game I think twice and he said, ‘Guys, can I propose to you, I want to do something that’s unique…I want to put it in this spot and kind of do something different and bring this to the world,'” Welch said. “And that wasn’t our plan, but like, are we going to turn down the exposure…Who would turn that down?”
The reveal didn’t exactly go as planned, with many player reactions to Highguard boiling it down to being just another hero shooter. Welch said the team put together a trailer to “entertain” for The Game Awards but failed to show Highguard’s unique gameplay loop.
“Look, it didn’t go as well as we thought obviously, and I guess part of that’s the spot that it was put in and part of that’s on us, which we own,” Welch said. “Perhaps we made a spot that was more about entertaining, and then less about the loop. And so that’s on us. We own that.”
As for the radio silence from the studio in the wake of Highguard’s reveal, that was also always part of the plan, according to Welch. Whether the reception at The Game Awards was positive or negative, the intent was always to go dark until Highguard was playable.
“We just kept quiet because we knew the next thing we did should be the game itself, hands on sticks, and you decide for yourself,” Welch said.
Highguard is available now on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5, with Wildlight having additionally revealed its 2026 content plans for the shooter. In GameSpot’s hands-on Highguard preview, we said there is “something exciting and fresh about the overall experience,” even if it might not thrive in an “already crowded live-service shooter market.”
