Developing video games is difficult and unpredictable, and advertising and marketing them isn’t any completely different. Sometimes corporations make selections they later remorse. Maybe you had a bunch of splashy reveals made asserting one launch date, just for a last-minute change to throw issues into disarray. Maybe a possibility presents itself, one which feels too good to go up, and also you shift your complete strategy to accommodate it. Sometimes that doesn’t work out both.
The plan had at all times been to shadowdrop Highguard, a multiplayer hero shooter developed by Wildlight Entertainment, a studio made up of ex-Respawn Entertainment heavyweights. It’s a method that benefitted Apex Legends, a Fortnite rival that got here out of nowhere and shortly muscled its manner into the aggressive live-service gaming panorama. So why did Wildlight Entertainment resolve to drop a trailer revealing the sport for the primary time on the Game Awards, figuring out the workforce would go radio silent once more instantly afterwards?
“Look, we always planned for a, you know, a surprise release,” studio cofounder Chad Grenier informed Kotaku at a preview occasion 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 determined to shut gaming’s greatest occasion of the yr with a trailer that left some intrigued however others unimpressed. It was of venture that ricocheted out throughout social media in unpredictable methods, with mini-drama cycles sprouting up across the lack of any new info surrounding the sport forward of its January 26 launch. Some even theorized it’d secretly get delayed after the poor response to the primary 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 stated. “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 web noise, the workforce stayed quiet. The subsequent time gamers noticed Highguard it might be stay and be capable of converse for itself. It’s a troublesome name. With multiplayer releases, a sport lives or dies primarily based on whether or not it will possibly discover a large enough viewers; whereas Highguard is free to play, which means that there’s little or no barrier to entry, the chances are nonetheless stacked towards it. At the preview occasion the place I spoke to members of the workforce, it was inconceivable to overlook the combo of delight and trepidation in regards to the sport’s first correct look to the press and influencers.
“So here we are. We’re launching the game now, and the team is resilient and enthusiastic,” Grenier stated. “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 in all a variety of media shops and content material creators invited to a launch occasion for Highguard in Los Angeles, California on January 21. It’s half hero shooter, half MOBA, half MMORPG raid. Players descend upon the map, race round to gather gear and assets, and in the end battle over a particular artifact that have to be deployed contained in the enemy workforce’s base with a view to win. It can’t be so much to wrap your head round.
Heading into the occasion, I had little or no thought of what to anticipate. While Wildlight contains builders who labored on Titanfall and Apex Legends, that is the studio’s debut mission. Co-founder Grenier and Dusty Welch described the shift to independence as in the end liberating however famous that about 60 % of the workforce’s roughly 100 workers beforehand labored collectively at Respawn, eliminating among the challenges of build up a completely new workforce.
Wildlight Entertainment
“When Chad and I left and started this company, it was to reunite a group of people,” Welch stated. “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 throughout COVID, Apex Legends was developed by a workforce that already had expertise working remotely. The co-founders additionally made one different factor clear about how they see the workforce; whereas they’re aiming for that “AAA” sport polish, they stress that they think about themselves an impartial developer with all the ache factors that may entail. Wildlight is self-publishing the sport. There’s no huge firm to supply QA assist or present a advertising and marketing machine. Apex had EA. This time they’re on their very 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 stated. “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 easy about designing a multiplayer shooter in 2026 both. Creative Director Jason McCord, in addition to 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 simply discarded as one more 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 stated. “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 reply ended up mendacity in an unlikely place. “One day, I walked into the office and was like, hey, have you played Rust?” Pineda stated.
Wildlight Entertainment
Highguard’s bold aim grew to become distilling the sensation of raiding bases within the in style survival crafting sim, however with out the time-intensive preamble of gathering assets and build up small fortresses. Eventually the core idea of the Shieldbreaker, the article that gamers would struggle over to resolve who could be raiding who, was born. The complete design course of was centered round discovering the appropriate steadiness of sustaining the vitality of these shootouts whereas preserving match time manageable.
At one level in improvement, victory was decided by absolutely destroying an enemy Keep. Eventually, the workforce settled on detonating bombs at aims like in Counter-Strike to streamline issues as an alternative. The determination to extend the rarity of drugs salvaged with every successive spherical till a winner had been topped got here on account of matches throughout playtesting devolving into menial back-and-forth tug-of-wars that may lose their spark. For the same cause, the workforce finally opted to provide the Shieldbreaker a time restrict earlier than it routinely prompts on the closest Keep.
The workforce’s ardour for the mission is infectious, even because the nervousness in regards to the looming launch is apparent to see on their faces. McCord tells me in regards to the story behind the axe, and the way it ended up serving as each a way of gathering assets and a fight device. Carlos explains how the “momentum problem” was solely actually solved in 2025, over three years into improvement. It stands out to me how open the workforce has been in regards to the struggles they went by creating Highguard, a sport they’ve labored on for years however whose destiny is on the mercy of a fickle and chaotic on-line viewers.
“We put our heads down and listened and paid attention to what was going on and took it to heart,” Grenier stated. “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.”
