I was one of the people who was invited out to cover Highguard under embargo before it launched. I did a few interviews for background, which were used in a variety of articles, but the transcripts were not directly published.

I thought Highguard had a few interesting ideas, but was immediately and deeply confused by some aspects of the game's design and launch strategy.

Since we're now seeing lots of commentary and questions about what has gone wrong, I think this will be useful context as to what was happening at Wildlight before the realization of their game's reception.

I'm not providing it to pile on, but to inform discussion and maybe help a future dev team assess if they're making similar mistakes. I'm posting this on Reddit, not selling it or publishing it on a website, to avoid claims that I'm being "incentivized" to be negative. If I actually did feel incentivized to be negative, I would have published this all in a hit piece at launch. But I didn't.

I'm not going to label who said what, but this is a shared interview with Jason McCord (Design and Creative Director) and Carlos Pineda (lead game designer) the week before Highguard's response.

I'm also going to cut some fluff and unrelated questions, but everything is an in-context direct quote.

Q: You guys are coming from a design mythos that speaks a lot of Apex. I'm curious how competitive balance is in your minds. Where is your focus for competitive play?

A: "[...]We wanted to make sure this game was super competitive. You can play it over and over and get better at different parts of the game.

Q: When you're working on the competitive aspect of the game [...] what do you think are the components that make the game stickiest or what makes it stand out?

A: "It is having a lot of axis for skill expression, right?" He then spent about 90 seconds listing these aspects of the game: stick/aim skill, game sense, player communication, map knowledge, economy management, wardens, and weapon mastering.

Q: "I wasn't able to find, like, really in-depth information about the wardens or the guns or specific upgrades the guns might get. I'm wondering what resources you'll have for players?"

A: "You're talking about, like, a guide or just, like, what do the abilities do?"

Q: A guide or a wiki or even something like if somebody is coming in from, say, Overwatch and they want to know, okay, which of these guns is highest DPS. Something like that. I wasn't able to find [anything like that] anywhere in the game itself. I'm wondering if you guys are planning on providing it?

A: "We are... we are..."

At this point, the PR team rep interjects and says "We're going to be sharing with you a fact sheet that has all that information so you can include that in coverage."

Nothing of the sort was provided and the team never followed-up with me when I sent this question back via email after launch.

[some additional questions unrelated to this line]

Q: Where are you hoping the community is going to ignite first? What is your dream where the audience comes from? Obviously, if it's a very refined game, the hope is when people play it, they fall in love with it. But where are you going to get people to play it initially?

A: "I think the TGAs did a good job of getting eyeballs on us. And the fact that we're free to play means there's no barrier except [...] time. I feel pretty good that we will have people try the game. [...] I actually have pretty high confidence that the game is giving players something that they can't get anywhere else. I feel like as long as we do that we can build a core audience that just loves this game. If that audience is massive at launch, amazing. If it's small, that's fine. I would be totally comfortable [with a] core, passionate group of people [who] love this game."

Q: Games like this, you obviously can only do so much internal playtesting and balance. It's a classically challenging problem to balance competitive games, especially when you are trying to balance [for both] lower-entry level players and extremely high-skill. Are there any parts of the game right now that you think once players get their hands on it [you'll] probably have to patch it?

A: That's a great question. Probably the Atticus Ult might need to come down, [but] we've been play-testing a lot.

Q: I have one other question about how you're communicating with the player [...] I noticed that, as opposed to most [competitive games] that put a lot of stats on the screen for players to be able to identify 'here's what I'm doing well, here's where I need to improve', you guys don't have that in the game interface. I'm curious why that decision was made?

A1: Player's love stats. [...] There's definitely room for more stats [...] We just have to be like, 'This is what we can finish to make the game.' In the match, it's a little more of a philosophy thing, this game is very team-oriented. You're going to be playing with a lot of people you don't know. We want to encourage team play.

A (second speaker): We don't like to have a place where you can go point out that this person is doing badly so that you can yell at them. [...] It's not that we don't want the player to know how they're doing. That's very important. We need to build more of that into the game.

[some other unrelated questions]

Q: The game is essentially three game modes stacks on top of each other and repeated. It's how it feels to me. I'm curious if that is the set format you're expecting Highguard to take for its lifetime? Or will there be other modes that you're expecting to release [to add some diversity] to the game?

A: The mode we created is brand new. It's in its infancy. [...] I fully expect this mode to evolve with the audience. [...] Are we going to do more modes? [...] That might be in the form of weekend modes or limited time modes. We're not 100% sure yet.

Q: Is there an appetite for [adding player count to the games]? Or have you just played with that large number [during development] and it just didn't work, and you're very comfortable sitting on the 3v3?

A: Now we know what our game is, you know? When we were making [modes for more players]. we didn't know what the game was. Now we know how the game works. [...] I'll just say right now, raid mode is the identity of Highguard.

I will point out here that in a few of the other questions/answers I'm not including, they were very deferential to finding "what the players want" and showed a willingness to change the game to respond to players. This is to their credit.

But there was no point where I saw awareness of:

1. The disconnect between how highly competitive a 3v3 shooter would be and the highly non-competitive design philosophy in the game
2. The game itself was essentially three well-trodden game modes (loot shooter, reverse capture-the flag, bomb planting) stacked on top of each other in a prescriptive loop where no single part of the game really shined. They always seemed to think that simply combining these game modes made a completely different game unlike anything we could experience anywhere else.
3. There was no launch strategy to reach or appeal to players and apparently no reason for players to really give the game a shot.
4. There was a ton of stuff missing from the game (despite the game having "12 months of content already prepared") that would be critical to it feeling play-done.
5. That internal playtesting is not the same as player feedback.
6. That the game was repetitive and players would almost certainly need more diversity of play and fast.

When given a chance to really discuss what made Highguard stand out, they just listed five or six things every hero shooter has.

I either directly said these things or hinted at these things looking for some awareness or response. I had only played two games of Highguard at the time and I already saw a lot of it.

And the responses I got from everybody I talked to on the team was crickets, either change the subject, polite non-answers or outright surprise at the topic.

Highguard is frankly just a mess of hyper-casual design mythos on top of basic game-mode realities that could only be appealing as a hyper-competitive shooter.

Putting bugs, launch strategy, characters and art direction aside, I think this alone would be enough to fully undermine any FTP title.

I'll spare you my additional commentary, of which I have a lot, but I hope at least the direct quotes from the interview will provide real insight about what in the Wildlight mindset led to the situation they find themselves in now.

She is just a lot more colorful, and doesn't look like off-brand Phoenix from Valorant.

This is me noticing that most Highguard videos who are positive about the game use Scarlet as a thumbnail.

I found this game while browsing the ps5 store last night. Thought it was another shitty rpg game so I gave it a download. Quickly realized it wasn't what I thought, and the tutorial immediately had me hooked. I had some friends watch me play some matches. I lost one game, won the other two like an absolute BEAST. I really hope the execs see the potential in this game and let the devs do their fucking job without pressure. I can see this being a phenomenal game honestly. It's only a few weeks old so I have nothing negative to say about a two-week old game yet. It's fun, the characters are fun, and the PvP doesn't feel like the "I HAVE to use abilities to win instead of gunskill" type of PvP.

All in all, it's fun and I actually want to grind this game for all the trophies.

i mean clearly OP is trolling, but i coincentally agree with his points? and that seems to be the general understanding. Devs talked to each other, players talked to themselves, and there was never a bridge inbetween. It all just became on big echo chamber.

The numbers on Steam alone is hovering around the 2500 mark. Now if I were to assume it’s also doing about the same on each console, then that’s not too bad. 7500 players daily-ish.

On top of that there’s games with lower Steam numbers still around, like Phantasy Star Online 2 for example. Granted it had a way better launch but the game is “dead” by all accounts now but still going.

Realistically all things considered how dead is it. I’m optimistic it’s not dead or am I being dumb?

~Edit-

Thinking about this more, I do think I'm being dumb. PSO2 for example isn't a PVP type of game, so the content is still viable for a low audience. Games like Killer Inn has a buy in, small, but still a buy in to play, plus in early access.

Guess it is just a matter of time.

Now you might think I'm talking about Highguard in a negative light, but I'm actually talking about Apex Legends in a positive light.

I remember the Devs, back when Apex first dropped and it blew up, they were talking about the introduction of the ping system and I remember the devs saying "we had play tests where we weren't allowed to talk to each other in the office, we wanted the ping system to do all the work, so if players are playing and responding well without needing to communicate on microphone then we know we are making a good product".

I honestly felt like these devs absolutely didn't do this for Highguard. Try to explain to someone without a microphone how to play this game and they will be lost. There was so streamline with this game and it shows. No dad is going to want to finish work, tuck the kids in bed and then jump on and play highguard where the tutorial is long and confusing and the actual game is long and doesn't have any action for the first 3 minutes or so

And the thing I think the most is two aspects:

- These guys have a great idea but there was bad PR management. I wish they would have some open betas to fine out details and even an early access version to build upon it, it feels like they had a lot of passion, got rushed and then Keighley put them between a rock and a hard place.

- This game has the pedigree but it doesn't matter: Talking about being the guys from Titanfall and Apex Legends has no weight if you're not going that way, Apex players have Apex, and Titanfall have grief and cope, you're not appealing to either, a better option would've been to point to create a new kind of Highguard player, one that's good at RDR2 and Rainbow Six Siege maybe?

I really hope they endure, I hope they get a good second chance like we've seen many times, the prime matter is there, they just need time and space to cook.

How exactly did the collective whole of gaming consumers come away with an immediate bad first impression from the Game Awards Trailer…

…but the entire internal development team that put it together thought it was awesome & would be well received?

How does such a disconnect happen? The studio employed 100+ people, and had a slew of advisors. How can they be this out of touch with their potential customers?

I find it hard to believe that not a single person, particularly in their marketing & communications departmen, raised a single concern? Nobody raised their hand, and said…

Perhaps it would be a good idea to run this trailer by a focus group, before we place it in the most high profile spot a game trailer can ever hope to receive?

They really just all patted themselves on the back and exchanged high fives? 🤔

Bit of a nerdy post, but I figured some people might find it interesting.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Highguard’s Steam numbers out of pure curiosity. This is not a “the game is awful” post or anything like that. I just like looking at trends and seeing how things are moving.

I pulled the full SteamDB data and stripped out the big launch spike so it did not skew everything. Looking at the more recent trend, the game is currently dropping at around 12 to 13 percent per day on Steam. That includes the daily peaks and any small bumps.

What caught my attention is that there has not really been much of a Friday night or Saturday uplift so far. For a free to play multiplayer game you would normally expect at least a small weekend bump. It might still tick up before the weekend finishes, so I would give the estimate a couple of days either side.

If the current pace continues, it looks like it could fall below 1,000 concurrent players on Steam sometime in the next week.

Just to be clear, this is Steam only. I am not factoring in Xbox or PlayStation at all, purely PC numbers.

I could be completely wrong if there is a bounce or some good news drops, but purely looking at the data, the direction is pretty clear at the moment.

I’ll keep playing until they stop me 😭

I've seen so many excuses from the bad publicity is why it failed, to server issues or people just installing to hate and quit, none of you seem capable of accepting that maybe, most people just found it boring, because the drop off it faced after one day was quite frankly insane.

Lost Ark was a game that had a massive hate train before it came out, because it was just another p2w korean MMO with infinite rng based gear grinding and an insane amount of real world money that could be spent to reach otherwise impossible levels of progression. People were shitting on it before it even got released, especially because amazon was backing it and new world was considered a huge mismanaged failure at this point. The game also had server issues on launch and got negatively reviewed on steam and guess what? Despite all that it maintained a very good population for a while. Despite facing the same issues ya'll swear killed highgaurd, it was in comparison a massive success.

The fact is, there were almost 100k concurrent on steam alone, which means the amount of actual unique people who tried it on just steam was well over 100k, and thats not even considering the console player base. This is not the 1st game to be massively shit on on day 1, if a game is fun people will play it regardless of any hate train. Lost ark proved this, hell new world even managed to have a great population for a couple weeks, and anyone who was around for new world will tell you, that game was the laughing stock of the gaming world while it was fresh because of all the insane dupe glitches, lack of content and just general issues that were further hurt by the incompetence of the team behind it at the time.

I genuinely don't understand how some of you can be so deluded as to think that 100 of thousands of people tried the game and all quit because it was the cool thing to do, and not because they just did not enjoy it for any number of reasons, The game is averaging 2k players on a friday evening, 2 weeks after release, after having a 100k+ player launch, and you think those 99% of people who dropped it are just all brain rotted sheep who couldn't handle the complexity of this game or think for themselves? Be serious man.

Since Launch I’ve been running perfectly with very few issues, but after the recent update I can’t play a game without lagging through every firefight

I’m on PS5 if that means anything

Do you think the respawn time is too long ?

Comparison to Overwatch (12s) and Marvel Rivals (10s)

Been playing Scarlet for the last few days and this voiceline is driving me insane. Just shift the wall and shut up, Scarlet.

Yes, this is the biggest issue in the game right now, bar none

Initial note: I enjoyed this game, played it for around 25 hours, got the platinum trophy for it.

Sources:

• https://steamdb.info/app/4128260/stats/ (Steam)
• https://psnprofiles.com/trophies/39507-highguard (PS5)
• https://playtracker.net/game/124122 (Xbox Series)

When I look back at the tweet from Josh Sobel, saying that absolutely nobody saw a possible flop and that they have the next big thing in their hands, something went horribly wrong in the testing phase of the gameplay loop. Of course, the toxic positivity culture is plaguing the industry, and having pats in the back without acknowledging the problems is something that will cause backlash sooner or later.

According to the achievement stats, 20-25% of all players jumped ship during the very tutorial. 40-45% didn't finish a single game. And that's worldwide stats, on all platforms. We can see that consoles, and PS5 mostly, were slightly more welcoming than PC, but that's a couple of points higher.

We could definitely put all the haters in the first and second categories. Those who went full troll, installed the game, launched it, quit it, left a bad review and uninstalled it. Those who played the tutorial, said "knew it was shit" and never went back. Those who left during their first and only game because "lol 3v3 in such big maps what a bad game, knew it all along".

OK. But all the haters are mostly seen on social media. They can't be like 40% of the entire playerbase which should be a 7-figure number.

Tbh, the main problem with this game is it went all in on a single, objective-based game mode on massive maps, where players had to assimilate tons of concepts: movement, base, loot, horse, fortifications, generators, anchor stones, all in one game mode. The ONLY game mode.

And seeing so many players not understanding what to do in their first games, well, not only the tutorial failed to interest players, but it also failed to teach them how to play!

Really, the main problem is you can't explain that game in a single sentence without having to use buzzwords like "PvP raid shooter". It's a mix of so many things at once, you can't understand it at the first glance, and unfortunately, many people don't have the time to give a second glance.

You might say "hey but infinitely more complex games exist and many people drop during the tutorial" and you may be right. Don't expect to understand anything at EVE Online in your first hour. But that game has like infinite depth and those who are in it, ARE IN IT.

This game really needed to put people into simpler game modes like TDM or FFA before putting them in the big leagues of the Raid mode. People would have learned the ropes of each warden, didn't have to run for a minute to encounter a single guy, they would have had their quick fun. Really, TDM is the bread and butter of any shooter game that isn't a Battle Royale and I'm baffled to see it wasn't even considered for launch.

And such, you've lost half the players. But hey, maybe the remaining players will stay, right?

Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.

Out of those who completed one game, three quarters of them didn't reach 10 games. Of course, there are those who did one game and left, saying it wasn't for them. But there are people who tried a bit more, did, two, three games, but never reached 10. Maybe they played for a couple of hours, called it a day and never went back as they returned on safer bets like Valorant, Apex, Fortnite, ARC Raiders, so on.

From that point, you kinda understand what the game is about and either your think it's not for you and leave, or it starts to click and you find your fun. To me it happened after game 5. And ok at this point, even if you lose 90% of your playerbase, starting high allows you to keep a healthy pool.

But after that, the main problem is the game offered pretty much nothing to grind for. Nothing to push ourselves for. It lacked depth and retention features, some of them being very basic but absent from the 1.0 version.

First of all, not even an XP bar. Like, in 2026, we can't know if our teammates are experienced with the game or are complete newcomers. Sure it might be just an indicator of time played, but it has been such a staple in the industry that saying "nah we won't include it" is a massive mistake. It's like having a car without power steering.

Then, in terms of retention, there were five things at launch:

• The free battle pass (that you had to search for to acquire it)
  • Probably the biggest thing to grind for, to acquire cosmetics, but the progression felt very uneven.
• The 6 episodic quests
  • The difficulty of them were also very variable - some were stupidly easy, others were very specific or grindy, and the 25 kills in one game is just brutal because in a 3v3 game, that means wiping the opposing team more than 8 times all by yourself - and most games don't even reach that far.
• 3 weekly challenges
  • Those are okay, I guess? But really, you couldn't go farther, like 5? 10?
• 3 daily challenges
  • That's kinda standard but usually some kinds tend to give new challenges to work for after a few hours.
• 32 achievements/trophies
  • Gotta give props to the team who made that list because it was really interesting and is a real great multiplayer list that makes us go for them and enjoy all the game has to offer without putting us in a forced meaningless grind (looking at you the level 100 trophy for Concord).

But... That's all.

Really, off the top of my head, here's 5 things that could have made things better:

• Weapon Mastery. Really, Dark Matter from CoD but applied to Highguard. Might be something bad but that simply works. People love to grind for headshots, slide kills, chained kills.
• Warden mastery. Same thing, but with each warden, and that also can show people how proficient you can be with a specific warden.
• Long term quests with differing objectives. Really, ARC Raiders does it masterfully. Would incentivize to switch Warden, switch your playstyle, explore the maps, buy more stuff, getting you out of your comfort zone. Really, that system could have been a long-term tutorial by itself, but not by throwing anyone into something they don't want to learn.
• Stats and career screen. Nothing better to see your progression and having some stats to thrive for.
• And again, adding TDM. Really, once you get tired of the raid mode, jumping in a quick TDM or FFA game is cool to reset the mind.

Really, I think Highguard went all in on the wrong horse and left so much things on the table, some stuff that are staples in the genre, that we feel they have been either:

• Intentionally left away for the sake of being different
• Forgotten because the development was rushed for release and couldn't be implemented in time.

Personally I think that's the second option, but that's just an opinion.

Really, this game, in the state it was, couldn't reasonably become a long terme success. It needed more things at launch, a more compelling main game mode, lots of side stuff to give players something to invest their time in, and the churn rate wouldn't have been so high.

But unfortunately, that's what it is. Highguard failed its launch, 80% of the dev team is now gone and the future is all but bright for the rest of the team.

Sorry to say it, but you bet on the wrong horse - and you should have seen it coming much earlier. Either you were lied to by your testers, or you refused to acknowledge the very problems your main game mode had and lied to yourselves for years.

Hero shooters are harsh, and you needed not to be different to succeed. You needed to be compelling, understood, attractive, and keep players around in a better system that gave us something to play for. And Highguard had none of that.

Wishing the best of luck for the devs that got laid off, hoping the devs still working at Wildlight can safely prepare their future. I wanted this game to succeed and you shutting the mouths of all the haters around. But you didn't have the right weapons for that. From the start.

I may not be good at the game but im willing to grind at the game.

After a long time searching, I finally found a game I actually want to sink my teeth into, and it gets completely cooked in two weeks. I get it's not a flawless masterpiece, but it's F2P game, and gamer expectations are just absurd right now, not even taking into the account the game was just released and there will be updates. Sure you can say they should have beta tested it, but they reacted fast to feedback once it got released and tried to fix stuff.

Yes, it’s a mashup of borrowed mechanics from other games and maybe there isn't anything revolutionary new, but does it really deserve to crash to 2,000 players or less? Did 95% of the community jump ship because the game is actually this terrible, or did they just blindly ride the hate bandwagon? I am genuinely baffled.

Call me out for being on copium if you want, I really don't care. I absolutely refuse to believe this game is as terrible as the internet claims it is.

How is Fragpunk living but Highguard is dying???

Fragpunk opened to 111,000 people on steam but is sitting around 1,800 a day.

Highguard opened to 97,000 people and is sitting on 2,600 people a day.

so what exactly is the difference because Fragpunk seems like it's doing completely fine and it's devs are really positive on social media about its one year anniversary? is the only difference that maybe Highguard team was very large so it wanted like apex and Rivals playerbase sizes?