After going all quiet on the digital front for six weeks, Wildlight Entertainment’s free-to-play fantasy shooter Highguard is officially out on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. If you were concerned about the game’s longevity, you can rest easy because the company’s co-founder and CEO said it isn’t going anywhere.
Speaking to Variety on launch day–January 26–Dusty Welch said that Highguard is nothing like Concord or Overwatch (even though it sort of rhymes with the former and is kind of synonymous with the latter). Specifically, Welch noted that, unlike the previous two games (which have been unceremoniously shut down), Highguard won’t suffer a similar fate anytime soon. (It’s worth mentioning that although Overwatch shut down, Overwatch 2 rose up in its place and has updates planned. Concord, however, is dead and gone.)
“What we’re confident in is that we’re not going anywhere,” Welch explained. “We’re not going away. We as a team have a lot of experience in building franchises that have staying power. And this one, as [co-founder and game director Chad Grenier] alluded to, we have a year’s worth of content that’s near completion that is going to engage an audience for quite a bit of time. So we’re excited to be able to bring that. We have the experience, but that said, we’re humbled, and we hope people love this–but we’re ready to engage with them.”
Welch pointed to the year-one roadmap, which sees Highguard receiving an update, known as “episodes,” every two months starting in February. The forthcoming update will add a ranked mode, a new mount, another hero (called “Wardens”), a new raid tool, an additional base, and a new map to blast friends and strangers on. Each of these episodes will feature new content like this.
With the game officially out on consoles and PC, it’s seemingly attracting a substantial audience, reaching nearly 100K concurrent players on Steam day-one. Although Wildlight Entertainment isn’t concerned with huge player numbers as a determinant of the game’s success, the figures do bode well for a brand-new game from a brand-new studio–even if that studio is mostly comprised of former Apex Legends and Titanfall folks.
In GameSpot’s Highguard preview, writer Jordan Ramée called it a “fresh enough combo” to be its own thing. He described the game as a “a first-person shooter that follows both the attacker-versus-defender structure of Rainbow Six Siege and the lane-focused bomb-planting format of Valorant, but within the much larger objective-focused, base-destroying scope of the space battles of Star Wars Battlefront 2” you probably haven’t played before.
