After cratering player counts and laying off most of its employees, Wildlight Entertainment’s Highguard is trudging along – not quite on life support but still struggling. Between reportedly not wanting to conduct external playtests in favor of shadow drop, the “hubris” of leadership due to their success with Apex Legends and Tencent secretly funding the title (before allegedly pulling support), the story behind where it all went wrong just gets deeper.
Alex Graner, who worked as a senior level designer at Wildlight, offered his own take on where concerns began via the Quad Damage podcast (transcription via PCGamesN). Amid it “constantly evolv[ing],” his “biggest fear” was the decision to “go full-in on 3v3″ – effectively catering to more hardcore PvPers.
“I can only speak to my side of it as a level designer, but when I joined [Wildlight], it was trying to figure out this new, ambitious game, and this team is always pushing the boundaries. You don’t strive to create something that doesn’t work out, but it happens, unfortunately. Throughout development, we really leaned into the competitive side of it, and that was always one of my biggest fears as a player.
“3v3 is always the sweatiest version of anything like battle royale, objective modes, wingman, you know it, you name it. It requires such a high intensity of communication with your team and team play that it doesn’t leave much room for casualness. I think that was the biggest thing that turned a lot of players off Highguard.”
The sheer complexity of the gameplay loop didn’t help, especially compared to Apex Legends, which was “really easy to understand after you played one game.” The fact that it launched when battle royale titles were still “kind of an up-and-coming mode” didn’t hurt.
“Highguard has all these different rules and stages, it’s like, ‘Oh, you want to loot, now we’ve got to chase this objective, now we have to plant this objective, now it’s overtime… It has all these rules, which I think work at a really high level, but when players are first coming in, it’s a lot to grasp.
“On top of all that, because it was 3v3, that kind of game just requires high-skill movement and shooting, which is already a pretty high [bar to] entry as well. So if you just have a few bad games or your teammates aren’t sticking together, you’re just going to get rolled, and it’s very hard to 1v2 in our game.
“At the end of the day, the focus on teamwork ended up contributing to Highguard’s undoing. “It’s all designed to be a team-based shooter. I think that was the biggest thing. People just kind of turned it off because they didn’t have the team,” said Graner.
Wildlight continues to deliver content as outlined on its roadmap – it even added a new mode that completely removes the mining phase, thus streamlining matches further. However, with only 541 peak concurrent players in the past 24 hours – a massive fall from nearly 98,000 – on Steam, you have to wonder how much longer it can keep going.