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Wildlight CEO Dusty Welch is conflicted about whether Highguard's peculiar and controversial reveal at The Game Awards 2025 was a good decision, especially as he struggles with toxicity in the wake of the game's rocky launch this week.
Originally planned to be shadow-dropped after about four years in development, Highguard was announced as the final reveal of last year's Game Awards – a coveted spot usually reserved for much more high-profile projects – reportedly, after some convincing from host Geoff Keighley. The free-to-play shooter from Wildlight, a studio comprised of former Apex Legends and Titanfall developers, failed on the global stage to wow viewers with its fairly generic looking fantasy world, heroes, and abilities. Huh, another live-service hero shooter, was the general vibe.
In retrospect, Welch admitted to Bloomberg that, "We didn't do a great job with our trailer ... We own that." One thing he's less sure about, however, is whether it was the right call to reveal Highguard at The Game Awards after all.
"That's an incredibly fair question, and it's one I ask myself quite a bit," he told Bloomberg. "It's one that I'm going to continue to ask myself for a period of time. If we are wildly successful, I will still ask myself that because I'm interested in the business side and how we communicate to players and press. And was that the right way? Was there a different way? Was there a better way? And I don’t know the answer to that yet today."
Whether you chalk it up to live-service fatigue, the game's reveal, or actual questionable game design, there's no denying the general reaction to Highguard has not been very positive. While critical reviews are still trickling in, the overall reception that seems to be forming, although still fluid, is mixed at best. To this day, Welch isn't sure if the shooter's now infamous Game Awards trailer had anything to do with the blowback.
"The toxicity is challenging, and it’s debatable whether we would've had more or less or the same by doing the Game Awards," he said. "I don’t know, and we'll never know the answer to that. But I think that that's an angle that has to be considered going forward for anyone in game development."
For me, the noise around Highguard's launch has made it a little tricky to figure out whether it's actually any good or not, especially since there still aren't a whole lot of critical reviews. Steam reviews are "mostly negative," but those shoot way up to "mostly positive" if you filter them by people with over three hours of playtime. Of course, if you like the game enough to play for three hours, you're probably a lot more likely to say positive things about it, but there's also an argument to be made that people who invest the time to become comfortable with Highguard's somewhat complex systems and match structure, perhaps are finding that it's more than just a lazy mishmash of popular shooters doomed to fail, as many reviews suggest.
For what it's worth, I took matters into my own hands and installed the game last night, and found myself thoroughly whelmed after a couple of games. I haven't played nearly enough to form anything resembling a concrete opinion, but I will say I'm not exactly dying to play more right now. That said, it ran like an absolute champ on my ancient RX 580-equipped PC, so it deserves credit for that.
Highguard's first big patch came this week with a bunch of performance improvements, and just today, Wildlight announced a limited time 5v5 mode seemingly in response to complaints about map size, which I can confirm is definitely an issue in the main 3v3 mode. It seems the studio has taken an extremely reactive approach to player feedback, so it's very hard to say what form(s) Highguard will take from here.
