Highguard devs say it was always the plan to "go dark" after its reveal, à la Apex Legends' launch

Good, bad, I don’t bloody know yet the thing’s only been about for five seconds, but we can certainly say one thing now: Highguard is out. Now we can sit and prepare ourselves for more inane and pointless discourse about yet another live service shooter that we’ve probably had several times before. Hooray! But before we get ahead of ourselves, a moment of reflection, courtesy of the devs behind Highguard itself, who have spoken out about all that silence following their Geoffies reveal.

“Look, I wish Highguard had been received better. I wish the feedback had been better,” Wildlight Entertainment CEO and founder Dusty Welch explained to PC Gamer in a new interview. “Part of that’s on us, right? We didn’t put our heads in the sand. We, as a team, saw the feedback. We’re gamers ourselves. We’re online ourselves reading the feedback.

“I think, ultimately, we could have made a different trailer—a better trailer that wasn’t about entertaining, which is what we think [The Game Awards] was about. We could have made something that did a better job of highlighting the unique loop of the game. So that’s on us. We take that, but the team is resilient.”

Welch went on to note that Geoff Keighley is a “friend of the studio” and had played the game prior to reveal, apparently saying he’d “love to do something different and put an indie studio and a free-to-play game” up at The Game Awards. Let’s pause for a moment here to highlight that the use of the word indie here feels quite disingenuous, given that Wildlight is a 100+ person studio. Independent, sure, but we all know roughly what indie means, and it’s not that. You made bleedin’ Apex Legends, come off it!

Anyway, design and creative director Jason McCord also explained that the trailer at The Game Awards was just meant to be a reveal, and then they’d keep quiet. “The plan was to announce, go dark, and then the next thing that we want players to see is the game. If the reception had been totally different, it would have been the same plan. The key is, you’ve got to play the game.” Essentially, an attempt at repeating what Apex Legends achieved on its launch.

I probably won’t play it, however, as it really doesn’t look to be my thing, so I’ll let you lot be the ones to decide if this one gets to stay in the very empty hall of live service shooters.