Highguard looked bland. Highguard sounded bland. After my first 30 minutes with it I still wasn’t convinced it didn’t feel bland. But I stuck with it. I played a couple dozen hours with friends. I fell in love with it. I’m going to miss it.
Wildlight Entertainment’s ill-fated multiplayer shooter goes offline today forever. In just three months the game went from closing out the 2026 Game Awards to being cemented in popular online gaming lore as “Concord 2.0.”
It’s weird to love a game that ends up disappearing so quickly and under such messy and toxic circumstances. The vibes surrounding Highguard were rancid from the jump. But the vibes in the PS5 party chat where I played with two close friends were terrific as we enjoyed some of my favorite multiplayer moments of the last year.
The things that turned some players off about the game were precisely what kept me sticking around. Highguard is slow to play, confusing to understand, and, broadly speaking, pretty devoid of swagger. But that lack of spark, that zestless-ness, ended up making Highguard my perfect late-night chillout with bros.
I’ve taken to thinking of it as the gaming equivalent of my go-to light/cheap beer (Yuengling, PRB, Narragansett). It’s familiar. There’s no big investment. It takes the edge off and I can play a couple of extra rounds without feeling hungover the next day from overly sweaty defeats. The fact that most people were playing Marvel Rivals, Overwatch, or Valorant instead only helped.
The looting phase is undercooked but I’ve grown fond of the rush to loot chests and bash crystals while vying with the enemy team over the Shieldbreaker spawn point. I have my favorite heroes—Condor and Una—and my favorite guns—Vanguard and Kraken. I love the race to the enemy keep as tiny teams of three converge on the wide-open fields just outside where the Shieldbreaker needs to be planted.
One of the special things about Highguard is its mounts. Instead of just relying on a sprint, you can also instantly summon various animals to ride at top speed toward objectives or away from enemies. Duels on foot are one thing, but circling behind cover while rotating on mounts and trying to hit a moving target while firing from the hip is frenzied, chaotic, and oddly satisfying.
Weirdly, it reminds me of playing Army Men 3D with my cousin on the original PlayStation. That versus mode was 1v1 across big, long corridor maps. We spent hours trying to capture flags, sneak past each other, and get the jump from behind despite how severely limited the mechanics were. That game also got panned. GameSpot gave it a 4.6 out of 10. I still cherish it.
For me and a couple of close friends, it scratched the itch I still occasionally have to play Dota 2 or some other MOBA. But there’s no complicated leveling tree to monitor during matches, no NPC waves to manage, or any of the other elements that ratchet up the strategy, tension, and drama.
Highguard was more muted. That didn’t win it a big following but it did make it a perfect end-of-the-day palette cleanser for me when I wanted to play a couple of matches with friends, which would inevitably yield a handful of thrilling moments without all of the work and time commitments that most other shooters like it require.
Unlike the dozens of other failed live-service games I barely ever played, this one managed to stir some magic for me, however briefly. I’m genuinely sad to see it go. Tonight I’m pouring one out for all the Wardens who feel the same.
