Gaming: 'ultimately, We Could Have Made A Different Trailer': Highguard Ceo...

When Highguard debuted as the "one last thing" at the end of The Game Awards in December, the internet responded to the new hero shooter with a resounding "meh." After the reveal, Wildlight Entertainment then went dark for nearly two months as it geared up for its late January launch. Official Highguard promotion stopped as soon as it started, which prompted a swell of spectators (largely on X, the misery app) to declare Highguard the next Concord and question if it would be delayed or cancelled outright.

Speaking with Wildlight at a hands-on event in Los Angeles last week, several Highguard devs admitted they wished the reveal had gone down differently, but made it clear that the mixed reception didn't alter their release plans.

"Look, I wish Highguard had been received better. I wish the feedback had been better," Wildlight Entertainment CEO and founder Dusty Welch told PC Gamer. "Part of that's on us, right? We didn't put our heads in the sand. We, as a team, saw the feedback. We're gamers ourselves. We're online ourselves reading the feedback.

"I think, ultimately, we could have made a different trailer—a better trailer that wasn't about entertaining, which is what we think [The Game Awards] was about. We could have made something that did a better job of highlighting the unique loop of the game. So that's on us. We take that, but the team is resilient."

Welch explained that, contrary to assumptions at the time that Wildlight paid a hefty fee for its inclusion at The Game Awards, host Geoff Keighley simply believed in the game and wanted it in the show.

"Geoff's a friend of the studio. He came in and he played the game a couple of times, and he loved it. So when he said 'Look, I'd love to do something different and put an indie studio and a free-to-play game up here and put it in the show,' I mean, as an indie who was unknown by choice, who wouldn't jump at the chance to do that? Here's the biggest platform [in gaming], right?"

As for the silent treatment following the reveal, design and creative director Jason McCord told PC Gamer it was always the plan to go dark leading up to launch, similar to what the core of Wildlight's ex-Respawn team achieved with Apex Legends in 2019.

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"The trailer at The Game Awards was meant to be an announcement trailer. The plan was to announce, go dark, and then the next thing that we want players to see is the game,

Source: PC Gamer