Wildlight Entertainment has announced that it is working on a new update for its PvP raid shooter Highguard that will address quite a few of the criticisms that have been levelled at the game. The update, targeting release tomorrow, will bring features that several players have been requesting, including the option to toggle aim-down-sights and crouch rather than having to hold the respective buttons down. Console players will also get FoV sliders, while PC players can expect more options for graphics scaling.
“We’ve been listening to feedback and working to add some highly requested features, including FoV sliders for consoles, toggle settings for ADS & crouch, and more graphics scaling options for PC,” wrote the studio on Twitter. “We’re targeting to release a patch tomorrow, with full patch notes once it’s live.”
This update will follow a server-side one that was released yesterday to address stability issues that players had been facing. More solutions for various issues are also slated for future patches, with the studio noting that it has been continuing to investigate these issues and takeplayer feedback.
Highguard was released earlier this week to a curious reception. While, at the time of publishing, the title is still sitting at “Overwhelmingly Negative” player reviews on Steam, there has clearly been some interest in the title since it has managed a strong player base for the time being. While it might have seen a noticeable drop off from its launch day which saw over 97,000 concurrent players (via SteamDB), the fact that it is still seeing over 10,000 players that might be actively enjoying the title indicates that there is still some interest in the multiplayer shooter.
As for the negative Steam reviews, there have been quite a few complaints about poor optimization, with one player noting that they can only get 100 FPS despite running a powerful PC with an AMD 7 9800X3D CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU. Others have also expressed a belief that the game’s map sizes are too large for its 3-on-3 format, and have said that they believe that the game would be better suited to 5-on-5 matches.
Highguard has seemingly been in the crosshairs for many online owing to the title getting a prominent spot at the end of The Game Awards 2025 for its reveal trailer. In an interview, studio co-founder Chad Grenier spoke about his discussions with TGA host Geoff Keighley, and how the trailer’s placement in the show was the latter’s idea because he wanted to do “something special” for Wildlight Entertainment. This, Grenier noted, was despite the studio eyeing a shadow drop release similar to Apex Legends. Ultimately, however, he acknowledged that the reveal trailer’s placement at TGA was “maybe a little risky” in hindsight.
“We’ve known Geoff for a long time, and he said, ‘let me do something,’ that’s maybe a little risky in hindsight—but different, [to] take a free-to-play PvP Raid Shooter and do something with it,” he explained. “So we rushed a trailer together. I wish the reception had been better, but in hindsight, we made a trailer to entertain really quickly, and didn’t show the gameplay loop, and what’s different and unique.”
Highguard is free-to-play and available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
