High Guard is stopping in less than two weeks and it just received its biggest update ever. It includes the 10th hero shooter character, a new weapon and a complete skill tree. Creative director Jason McCord said the update was released by The rest of the Wildlight Entertainment skeleton crew and that they wanted to release the new content even if it “is only played by a few thousand people.” The update comes after game director and studio head Chad Grenier pushed back against conspiracy theories attributing the game’s failure to toxic positivity.
“This is our last update and it’s important” he posted on on March 4. “Kudos to the Wildlight skeleton team for wanting to finish it and ship it to our remaining players, even though it’s only played by a few thousand people. They weren’t asked to do it. They asked if they could finish it and release it.”
The biggest change in the update is an XP system for leveling up and a skill tree that allows players to level up their characters around certain strategies. The four subclasses are Raider (attack), Harvester (resources), Treasure Hunter (loot), and Protector (defense). The perks from each of these areas can be mixed and matched to create unique hero builds. The update also adds Koldo, a tank character trapped in armor, and the Switchback marksman rifle.
Short of money and short of time Why wait to add all of this? McCord said it’s just not ready yet. “None of this was done at launch,” he said. wrote Wednesday. “Especially the skill trees. The team has been working over the last few weeks to get this done. Some things (Koldo, Switchback) were partially finished, planned for future seasons. The team chose the things closest to being finished and finished them.”
High Guardthe last update of comes just eight days before the game’s servers go permanently offline. The shutdown comes less than two months after the hero shooter Apex Legends And Fall of the Titans veterans launched. Although players preemptively call it a “Concord 2.0» Following a poor trailer at The Game Awards 2026, the free game attracted nearly 100,000 concurrent players on PC in its first 24 hours.
But most of those players, annoyed by a flood of negative early reviews on Steam from people with little time spent playing the game, didn’t stick around. Weeks later, Wildlight Entertainment laid off most staff after Tencent reportedly withdrew funding following missed launch targets. There were only around twenty developers left while new modes were introduced to try to give High Guard one last push. Its unexpected and premature termination was announced at the beginning of the week. The game lasted 31 days longer than Concord.
“That’s not really what happened.” Like this game, High Guard became the target of an anti-live-service, anti-woke backlash online that, while not responsible for the game’s ultimate failure, caused the atmosphere surrounding the game to stink to high heaven. “That’s not really what happened,” Grenier wrote in response to the assertions that High Guard was a victim of developers’ refusal to criticize the work of others. “We were very critical of the project and of each other. The team was encouraging and constantly speaking out what they thought. We always tried to put the game and the players first. We always tried to put the players first. The team was very critical.”
He continued: “Ultimately, we just made a few mistakes and created a game that didn’t resonate like our previous games. Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter and no one will know the true story of the studio or the game, and rumors and speculation will be what exists.”
