Highguard announces inevitable shutdown, coming soon

After struggling to survive following a failed launch and mass layoffs, Highguard has announced it’s shutting down on March 12th.

“Despite the passion and hard work of our team, we have not been able to build a sustainable player base to support the game long term. Servers will remain online until March 12th. We hope you’ll jump in with us one more time to show your support and get those final great matches in while we still can,” Wildlight Entertainment devs wrote.

Highguard launched on January 26th after getting glazed by Geoff Keighley and The Game Awards. While it boasted over 97,000 players that day, the raid shooter was highly criticized for its poor “shadow drop” strategy and awkward gameplay.

Despite the backlash, developers continued to communicate with players, expressing that they would make changes and updates throughout the year. Wildlight Entertainment actually had an entire year’s worth of content already planned.

Unfortunately, it was not enough to keep gamers interested and the player count continued to dwindle. It didn’t help that the gaming community was continuing to taunt the devs and call it the next Concord.

Highguard’s final update

Ahead of Highguard’s shut down on March 12th, developers are dropping a final update — and it’s a pretty big one.

A new warden and new weapon are being added to the game, along with account level progression and skill trees. It’s clearly a lot of the leftover content from what devs had planned for the 2026 roadmap.

Stay tuned for patch notes.