Widlight Entertainment, the studio behind the infamous free-to-play multiplayer game Highguard, has decided to lay off a majority of the team working on the game.
A post from a level designer working on the game, Alex Graner, has surfaced on LinkedIn. The post mentions that he and a majority of the folks working on Highguard have been laid off by the studio, and they’re actively on the hunt for new gigs.
From the studio’s perspective, maintaining a steady staff working on this game when the spotlight has already been shifted is a no-brainer. Highguard was actively booed during the Game Awards ceremony when it was announced, as it looked like an unfaithful hybridization of multiple gaming titles with nothing truly standing out.
Even at launch, we noted that the game was an optimization mess with unnecessary mechanics like quick-time events, which shouldn’t be part of a video game. It seems most of the folks who built the mechanics and the actual code were very out of touch with reality, thinking that such a game would make people skip touching grass. Marvel Rivals and Overwatch are still very much a thing, and Highguard needed to do better than them to stand out – which it very much didn’t.
Our heart goes out to everyone laid off. Getting back on your foot after a layoff is tough, and its definitely more difficult as increasing competition in the space is reducing the footprint big companies like Ubisoft or Electronic Arts used to command (can’t really put Rockstar in the same category as they do not have an annual release cycle for new games).
