Following its appearance as The Game Awards 2025 "One More Thing" announcement, Highguard was always going to face an uphill struggle. One developer said the game was "turned into a joke from minute one," but further post-mortems revealed deeper issues. Poor playtesting and limited modes were cited as two reasons for the game's rapid downfall. Within days, most of the Wildlight Entertainment team were laid off, and within just a month, it was shut down.
That shutdown happened today, with Wildlight officially switching the servers off at 11 am PST, but any hopes of the game receiving a Club Penguin-style send-off were quickly dashed, as only 399 players were present at the time of closure.
Okay, so there was no actual farewell party, and Wildlight Entertainment effectively just pulled the plug on the servers, but we've seen other instances where players congregate to celebrate a game's last moments.
Club Penguin had arguably the most famous send-off, with hundreds of penguins returning to say goodbye to the beloved browser game, but games like Anthem, Final Fantasy 14 (in its first iteration), and The Matrix Online all got some kind of fan send-off.
Sadly, there was no...
