Highguard Devs Talk Turning Rust Into A Hero Shooter And That Terrible Game Awards Reveal

Developing games is hard and unpredictable, and marketing them is no different. Sometimes companies make decisions they later regret. Maybe you had a bunch of splashy reveals made announcing one release date, only for a last-minute change to throw things into disarray. Maybe an opportunity presents itself, one that feels too good to pass up, and you shift your entire approach to accommodate it. Sometimes that doesn’t work out either.

The plan had always been to shadowdrop Highguard, a multiplayer hero shooter developed by Wildlight Entertainment, a studio made up of ex-Respawn Entertainment heavyweights. It’s a strategy that benefitted Apex Legends, a Fortnite rival that came out of nowhere and quickly muscled its way into the competitive live-service gaming landscape. So why did Wildlight Entertainment decide to drop a trailer revealing the game for the first time at the Game Awards, knowing the team would go radio silent again immediately afterwards? 

“Look, we always planned for a, you know, a surprise release,” studio cofounder Chad Grenier told Kotaku at a preview event earlier this month. “Geoff came in and wanted to do something special and put us in the TGAs. We were gonna do a shadowdrop, you know, since day one, almost since forming this company; we did it with Apex and it worked well.”  

Instead, Wildlight decided to close gaming’s biggest event of the year with a trailer that left some intrigued but others unimpressed. It was a gamble that ricocheted out across social media in unpredictable ways, with mini-drama cycles sprouting up around the lack of any new information surrounding the game ahead of its January 26 launch. Some even theorized it might secretly get delayed after the poor reaction to the first trailer. 

Wildlight Entertainment

“We’ve known Geoff for a long time, and he said, ‘let me do something,’ that’s maybe a little risky in hindsight—but different, [to] take a free to play PvP Raid Shooter and do something with it,” Grenier said. “So we rushed a trailer together. I wish the reception had been better, but in hindsight we made a trailer to entertain really quickly, and didn’t show the gameplay loop, and what’s different and unique.” 

Despite the online noise, the team stayed quiet. The next time players saw Highguard it would be live and be able to speak for itself. It’s a tough call. With multiplayer releases, a game lives or dies based on whether it can find a big enough audience; while Highguard is free to play, meaning that there’s very little barrier to entry, the odds are still stacked against it. At the preview event where I spoke to members of the team, it was impossible to miss the mix of pride and trepidation about the game’s first proper appearance to the press and influencers. 

“So here we are. We’re launching the game now, and the team is resilient and enthusiastic,” Grenier said. “They’ve made a ton of games in their careers; we’ve seen the highs and the lows. I think, ultimately, we believe wholeheartedly in what we’ve created.”

Kotaku was one of a number of media outlets and content creators invited to a launch event for Highguard in Los Angeles, California on January 21. It’s part hero shooter, part MOBA, part MMORPG raid. Players descend upon the map, race around to collect gear and resources, and ultimately battle over a special artifact that must be deployed inside the enemy team’s base in order to win. It can’t be a lot to wrap your head around. 

Heading into the event, I had very little idea of what to expect. While Wildlight includes developers who worked on Titanfall and Apex Legends, this is the studio’s debut project. Co-founder Grenier and Dusty Welch described the shift to independence as ultimately freeing but noted that about 60 percent of the team’s roughly 100 staff previously worked together at Respawn, eliminating some of the challenges of building up an entirely new team.

Wildlight Entertainment

“When Chad and I left and started this company, it was to reunite a group of people,” Welch said. “Like, Chad and [Creative Director Jason McCord] have worked together for 17 years. Chad was my game director on Apex; we’ve worked together for quite a long time, and we have 60, 61 people from Apex that are working here on a 100-person team. So we wanted to create an environment and a place that was a home to experience the best of game making to our ability.”

He continued, “That home, that freedom to find new, fun things was great—with none of the burns, and none of the blockers, and none of the oversight and the baggage that comes with some of the places that we’ve worked, or the experiences we’ve had.”

Wildlight is a “remote first” studio. While Dusty and Chad left Respawn during COVID, Apex Legends was developed by a team that already had experience working remotely. The co-founders also made one other thing clear about how they see the team; while they’re aiming for that “AAA” game polish, they stress that they consider themselves an independent developer with all of the pain points that can entail. Wildlight is self-publishing the game. There’s no massive company to offer QA support or provide a marketing machine. Apex had EA. This time they’re on their own.

“It’s a fresh start, which is a good opportunity in a lot of ways, but it can take a while to get things up and going at the speed you were accustomed to,” Grenier said. “Luckily, it’s offset by what needs to happen anyways, which is just a lot of long discussions about what we’re making here. So, you’ll have some people working on tech while these long design discussions are happening, and they kind of go hand in hand—but, you know, it’s hard. We don’t have a big publisher to give us anything or help us in any way. We’re very much on our own and learning new things that we’ve never had to do ourselves before.”

There’s nothing simple about designing a multiplayer shooter in 2026 either. Creative Director Jason McCord, as well as Higuard‘s Lead Game Designer Carlos Pineda, spoke to some of the challenges and inspirations that guided the studio in its early days—including some of the core inspirations behind what would ultimately become Highguard‘s unique gameplay loop. The team wanted it to be something that stood out, so the game wasn’t just discarded as yet another free-to-play PvP shooter.

“At the beginning, making the new game…we don’t know what the game is yet. We’re asking ourselves, what is it?” Pineda said. “What’s a game that we could make that people are gonna care about? Something that they’re not just gonna brush off like ‘it’s just another game.’ So we knew we had to not be one of those popular genres, not a battle royale or an extraction shooter.”

The answer ended up lying in an unlikely place. “One day, I walked into the office and was like, hey, have you played Rust?” Pineda said. 

Wildlight Entertainment

Highguard’s ambitious goal became distilling the feeling of raiding bases in the popular survival crafting sim, but without the time-intensive preamble of gathering resources and building up small fortresses. Eventually the core concept of the Shieldbreaker, the object that players would fight over to decide who would be raiding who, was born. The entire design process was centered around finding the right balance of maintaining the energy of those shootouts while keeping match time manageable. 

At one point in development, victory was determined by fully destroying an enemy Keep. Eventually, the team settled on detonating bombs at objectives like in Counter-Strike to streamline things instead. The decision to increase the rarity of gear salvaged with each successive round until a winner had been crowned came as a result of matches during playtesting devolving into menial back-and-forth tug-of-wars that would lose their spark. For a similar reason, the team eventually opted to give the Shieldbreaker a time limit before it automatically activates on the closest Keep.

The team’s passion for the project is infectious, even as the anxiety about the looming launch is plain to see on their faces. McCord tells me about the story behind the axe, and how it ended up serving as both a means of gathering resources and a combat tool. Carlos explains how the “momentum problem” was only really solved in 2025, over three years into development. It stands out to me how open the team has been about the struggles they went through developing Highguard, a game they’ve worked on for years but whose fate is at the mercy of a fickle and chaotic online audience. 

“We put our heads down and listened and paid attention to what was going on and took it to heart,” Grenier said. “But we stayed silent because we knew that the first time, the next time that we say anything to the audience, it better be the game and let the game speak for itself.”