Highguard Developers Had a Blind Spot to Feedback Despite Rigorous Testing

Despite its high-profile reveal at the end of the 2025 Game Awards, Highguard failed to resonate with audiences.

Perhaps it's the burnout from live service games; it's been a rough year for them unless your name is Arc Raiders. Maybe it's the fact that the game felt incredibly incomplete despite skipping Early Access.

Whatever the reason, Highguard is a game that, on paper, should have worked. After all, developer Wildlight Entertainment had the talent, comprising people who worked on Apex Legends and Titanfall. People love those games, so surely they'll love a hero shooter that looks and feels like Respawn's gameplay, right?

Of course, that's not at all how things turned out. As of today, Highguard is shutting down. It's a shame because we liked what we saw before the game went live, and there was an initial buzz. That's not guaranteed to translate to success, though, and people very quickly moved on. It's something Wildlight didn't expect, though, as one developer recently explained.

Highguard Had Extensive NDA Testing, But Still Had Blind Spots

Josh Sobel, a former tech artist and rigger for Highguard, has already commented on what he thinks happened to Highguard.

He has since expressed regret about his original comments, but brought up a good point:

In discussions online about Highguard, Concord, 2XKO, and such, it is often pointed out by gamers that devs like to blame gamers for their failures, and that that’s silly. As if gamers have no power. But they do. A lot of it. I’m not saying our failure is purely the fault of gamer culture and that the game would have thrived without the negative discourse, but it absolutely played a role. All products are at the whims of the consumers, and the consumers put absurd amounts of effort into slandering Highguard. And it worked.

It's easy to look at Highguard, a game that was slandered the second it was revealed, and fall into the trap of the online collective giving the game no chance to succeed. It's something that Wildlight didn't consider due to, as Sobel explains, "endless brutal feedback" from NDA testers.

He clarifies that the notion of Wildlight simply patting themselves on the back for making a good game "is totally false." The team "tore the game to pieces," suggesting a development cycle that was met with rigorous feedback and critique. Yet despite all of that internal feedback, what the team heard from players post-launch "was a curveball."

It's important to note that, unlike something like ARC Raiders or Marathon, there was no widespread Server Slam to deliver large-scale public testing for Highguard. Yes, they had their internal and external teams of NDA testers, but those teams are always limited, so they had some blind spots by the time the game launched.

Could Highguard have been saved by some public tests or even an Early Access launch? Possibly, but given what we've heard about Wildlight running out of time and money, I'm not sure if that was