The ex-developers of Highguard published concepts of characters that have not yet been seen on an inaccessible website. The situation is not very rosy.

As far as AAA games go, Highguard will probably be remembered as one of the least talked about, and even when it was in the spotlight, it was for all the wrong reasons. The game was kept secret until The Game Awards. Dusty Welch, the CEO of Wildlight Entertainment, revealed that the original plan was to launch the game secretly at the end of January, similar to what Respawn did with Apex Legends in 2019. Several members of the Apex Legends team worked on Highguard. However, Welch felt it would be foolish to refuse when Geoff Keighley suddenly approached Wildlight with an offer to close the gala with the Highguard trailer.

It’s easy to be wise after the fact, but the presentation caused quite a stir. Viewers wanted to see a big, new, single-player game as the show’s closing announcement, not another hero shooter. They immediately criticized Keighley and Highguard, creating a negative atmosphere that hit the game hard. Instead of postponing the game’s release to address the early complaints, Wildlight released it at the end of January as planned. Unsurprisingly, the game received negative reviews on Steam, and Welch admitted that the trailer did not present the game well.

Last week, we reported that Wildlight had to lay off most of its team following the disastrous launch of its game. Recently, one of the laid-off developers criticized players for not giving Highguard a chance. The game appears to be on its deathbed. There were only 1,309 concurrent players on Steam, and the official website has been unavailable for several hours. The few remaining players fear that the game could be shut down at any moment. Meanwhile, Stephen Totilo revealed that the game’s secret investor was Tencent, a Chinese tech giant.

After one of the laid-off developers took to Twitter to criticize players for not giving Highguard a chance, some former employees were given permission to share their work at Wildlight in their public portfolios. On the ResetEra forum, it was noted that Wildlight is allowing former artists to share their work. This is a goodwill gesture by the studio and gives these artists a better chance of finding work, as they can show off videos and images of characters from the game that have not yet been released. However, the fact that these designs are appearing at all raises more questions about the game’s future.

It’s possible that the shared characters were concepts that were well advanced in development but ultimately didn’t make it into future updates. However, given Highguard‘s evolution so far, players wonder if Wildlight is allowing these characters to be shared because the game won’t be around long enough for them to appear.

Unreleased characters appearing in a currently active live-service game is unusual, so while speculation about the images may ultimately remain just that, they could be another sign of Highguard‘s impending demise.

Source: WCCFTech, WCCFTech, SteamDB, Game File, ResetEra