Highguard Shouldn’t Be Announced at The Game Awards 2025

Wildlight Entertainment’s Highguard has finally been released, and so far, the game has mostly negative reviews on Steam, with the players calling it “another Concord.

Nevertheless, the developers have already presented their plan to support Highguard during the year, so we might just wait a little to see how the game will look. As we remember, Highguard was announced at the end of The Game Awards 2025 show, but it wasn’t always a plan. According to Vice President of Product and Publishing of Highguard, Jason Torfin, and Lead Designer Mohammed Alavi, they initially planned to make a shadow drop announcement with Highguard—just like they did with Apex Legends. However, The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley enjoyed the game a lot and decided to reveal it during the show, as you can check below:

“I think the fact that we’re independent and that we’re smart with how we run our business and build our team means that we have those luxuries. We’re not beholden to shareholders or any sort of other corporate shenanigans, and it allows us to have that sort of confidence. And from the get-go, you can’t bank on commercial success right out of the gate. If you do that, you’re probably going to fail most of the time.

And that’s why we were going to shadow drop. Let the game speak for itself. It was always the plan. And then, you know, Geoff came in the past year and he played the game. I mean, he really liked it and he was stoked. And we had an opportunity and we decided, okay, we can make a trailer that would be in our shadow-drop. And so, the one we put there at The Game Awards was the one that would be the first thing you saw in the shadow-drop, followed by twenty-five minutes of other context. And unfortunately, that trailer wasn’t meant to be the thing to ‘educate’.”

It’s curious that, according to a recent report from insider AleXXorTV and multiple rumors, Half-Life 3 should have been the last game at The Game Awards 2025 instead of Highguard, but Valve reportedly changed their plans. With this new interview of Highguard developers, the puzzle elements are starting to come together more and more, though it’s unlikely we will ever receive any official information.

Highguard is a free-to-play first-person shooter developed by Wildlight Entertainment, former developers of Apex Legends and Titanfall.

The game is currently available on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5.