Highguard is shutting down in lower than two weeks and it simply acquired its largest replace ever. It contains the hero shooter’s tenth character, a brand new weapon, and a whole talent tree. Inventive director Jason McCord mentioned the replace was pushed out by Wildlight Leisure’s remaining “skeleton crew” even when it “solely will get performed by a couple of thousand individuals.” The replace arrives after recreation director and studio head Chad Grenier pushed again towards conspiracy theories blaming the sport’s failure on poisonous positivity.
“That is our closing replace and it’s massive,” he posted on X on March 4. “Props to the skeleton crew at Wildlight for wanting to complete it and ship it to our remaining gamers, even when it solely will get performed by a couple of thousand individuals. They weren’t requested to. They requested if they may end it up and get it on the market.”
The replace’s largest change is an XP system for leveling up and a talent tree that lets gamers improve their characters round sure methods. The 4 subclasses are Raider (attacking), Harvester (assets), Treasure Hunter (loot), and Protector (protection). The perks in every of these areas might be blended and matched to create distinctive hero builds. The replace additionally provides Koldo, a tank character trapped in a swimsuit of armor, and the Switchback marksman rifle.
Out of cash and out of time
Why wait so as to add all these things? McCord mentioned it simply wasn’t but. “None of this was performed at launch,” he wrote on Wednesday. “Particularly the Talent Bushes. The crew crunched the previous few weeks to get it performed. Some stuff (Koldo, Switchback) was partially performed, scheduled for future seasons. The crew picked the stuff that was closest to completion and completed it up.”
Highguard‘s closing replace arrives simply eight days earlier than the sport’s servers go offline endlessly. The shutdown comes lower than two months after the hero shooter from Apex Legends and Titanfall veterans launched. Regardless of gamers preemptively calling it a “Harmony 2.0” following a poor reveal trailer at The Sport Awards 2026, the free-to-play recreation netted almost 100,000 concurrent gamers on PC throughout its first 24 hours.
However most of these gamers, goosed by a flood of early damaging Steam evaluations from individuals with little time spent enjoying the sport, didn’t stick round. Simply weeks later Wildlight Leisure laid off a lot of the workers after Tencent reportedly yanked funding following missed launch targets. Solely round 20 builders remained as new modes had been launched to attempt to give Highguard one final push. Its sudden and untimely shutdown was introduced earlier this week. The sport lasted 31 days longer than Harmony.
“That’s not really what occurred”
Like that recreation, Highguard grew to become the goal of an anti-live service and anti-woke backlash on-line which, even when it wasn’t chargeable for the sport’s finally failure, made the vibes surrounding the sport stink to excessive heaven. “That’s not really what occurred,” Grenier wrote in response to claims that Highguard was the sufferer builders being unwilling to criticize each other’s work. “We had been very essential in the direction of the undertaking and one another. The crew was inspired and consistently spoke their thoughts. We all the time tried to place recreation and gamers first. We all the time tried to place gamers first. The crew was very essential.”
He continued, “On the finish of the day, we simply made a couple of errors, and made a recreation that didn’t resonate like our previous video games did. Sadly, it doesn’t matter although and no person will know the true story of the studio or recreation, and the rumors and hypothesis might be what’s on the market.”
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