Highguard‘s developers have spoken openly about how the game’s looting and raid mechanics were loosely inspired by the crafting survival sim Rust, but a new report shows the game was originally conceived of as something quite different. Developers hoped to even potentially launch a single-player mode to explore the hero shooter’s fictional background more, but funding ran out sooner than anyone expected.
A new report by Bloomberg lays out Highguard‘s evolving design and why it was so intent on sticking to a potentially fatal PR strategy of staying in stealth mode until a disastrous Game Awards 2025 reveal. Originally designed to be a survival-focused shooter in the mold of Rust, things weren’t congealing the way the team had hoped. Two years in, they pivoted to a more competitive-shooter-focused design. The survival crafting elements were streamlined into the game’s current idea of a “raid shooter.”
Wildlight Entertainment reportedly explored matches of up to four teams before eventually settling on just 3v3. The result is giant maps with a big focus on looting and mining resources, a concept which feels empty and underbaked in the final version of the game that launched last month. Despite releasing to over 100,000 concurrents on Steam, nobody stuck with the game.
An open player beta might have caught these issues, but the team was reportedly committed to launching Highguard via a shadowdrop as Wildlight’s veteran staff had done with Apex Legends back in 2019. Multiple developers told Bloomberg that “hubris” was to blame for them not changing course sooner, thinking that past success was indicative of Highguard‘s future chances in an ever more crowded and hostile multiplayer gaming market.
[If players were shocked that Wildlight had layoffs just weeks after launch, well, so were developers at the studio. One of the most revealing pieces from the Bloomberg report is that staff thought they had months of runway to ship content and respond to player feedback to potentially improve the game. Instead, the majority of the studio was laid off almost immediately after the game didn’t succeed.
Some speculated that Tencent’s funding was contingent on launch metrics that Highguard fell way short of. The company’s TiMi Studio Group still hasn’t publicly acknowledged that it helped ship the “self-published” game.
