What's going on with Highguard? Silence since The Game Awards swirls speculation | indy100

Highguard - Official Reveal Trailer | The Game Awards 2025

IGN / VideoElephant

Continued silence from Wildlight Entertainment about Highguard is causing speculation to swirl on social media about what's actually going on.

Highguard is an upcoming free-to-play raid shooter which incorporates high-fantasy magic with fast-paced first-person shooting and is the debut title from Wildlight, made up of the creators of Apex Legends and Titanfall.

It was first revealed to the world at The Game Awards 2025 in December, closing out the ceremony with a two-and-a-half minute trailer, and is scheduled to release on 26 January.

But the reception to it from gamers so far has been mostly negative, with some underwhelmed that it closed out the prestigious ceremony and others already claiming it's "Concord 2.0".

Since that reveal, there has been complete radio silence about it.

The only videos on the game's official YouTube channel are the trailer itself and a collaboration with The Game Awards of a clip of when it was announced. On X / Twitter, the official Highguard account only has three posts and none since the night of The Game Awards.

But perhaps most concerning of all is the follower count on those platforms.

At the time of writing, the game's official X / Twitter account has less than 6k followers and just 1.31k subscribers on YouTube. It doesn't seem to have captured the imagination of gamers.

from Games

Gamers have been discussing this in the Games Subreddit and the general consensus is that gamers seem to be worried about Highguard's release.

One said: "I didn't necessarily hate what I saw from the trailer but the nature of it being the final reveal of the show really worked against it. Honestly for best results it would have been ideal to have had an open beta shadowdrop after the show ended so folks could at least form their own opinion with some actual gameplay."

A second commented: "I have zero evidence but am convinced they originally planned to shadowdrop this at The Game Awards. However between signing the contract and the event the game got delayed for whatever reason and we ended up with the weird month and a half away release date. Disaster of a marketing push and the (generously) tepid reception I'm sure has the studio panicked. Hopefully they can put out a good game but currently there's just nothing to go off despite releasing soon."

"Their mistake was making it the big final reveal for The Game Awards when people were expecting The Elder Scrolls 6, Half-Life 3 or The Witcher 4," a third posted. "They walked right into it."

A fourth agreed: "I think this is the correct play. Their 'one last thing' moment at The Game Awards was a potential fatal error from them and Geoff. They HAVE to let the game do the talking, not the marketing."

And a fifth said: "I feel like any pre-release news or trailers will just get the same poor reception that the initial trailer did (gamers love dogpiling on stuff like this), so it might be better on the dev side to wait for release and hope the gameplay is strong enough to garner positive reception and word-of-mouth."

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