UPDATE 03/03/2026 - Highguard developer Wildlight Entertainment has announced that the game will be shut down as of March 12, 45 days after it initially launched. Read the full story here.
Original Story:
Highguard has become one of the most talked-about games to kick off 2026, but all for the wrong reasons. After its maligned reveal at The Game Awards, despite its launch drawing 97K concurrent players on Steam alone, those players didn't stick around, and it lost the vast majority of its player base almost immediately. It was review-bombed on Steam, and barely two weeks after it had arrived on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, "most" of the team at developer Wildlight Entertainment had been laid off.
After one of the laid-off developers took to X (formerly Twitter) to call out players who wrote the game off after barely giving it a chance and a new report revealed some details about the game's funding, the latest development is that some of the laid-off staffers have been given permission to start sharing what they worked on at Wildlight as part of their public portfolios.
Spotted on ResetEra, Wildlight allowing the former artists to share their work is a good-faith move by the studio, and it gives these artists a better chance to find work by being able to show off these videos and images of currently unreleased characters from the game. That said, the fact that these designs are being released at all raises even more questions about the game's longevity.
Of course, it's possible that the characters shared were concepts that made it far into development, but were ultimately not chosen to be part of any future updates. Though with how things have been going for Highguard so far, seeing unreleased characters appear online in this fashion has players wondering if Wildlilght is allowing them to be shared because the game won't be around long enough for them to be released.
It's definitely not common to see unreleased characters from a live service game that is currently still active, so while the speculation surrounding the release of these images could turn out to be just that, it could also be another sign of Highguard's upcoming shuttering.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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