Highguard is changing up its menu in what could be a last ditch effort to gain some traction as its player count continues to dwindle. A new mode dispenses with the looting phase entirely and will just have players raiding each others bases back and forth, nixing the the phases that bored some players back at launch.
Here’s Wildlight Entertainment’s description of Raid Rush which goes live later today as part of the hero shooter’s latest update:
In Raid Rush, 2 teams of 5 players will take turns attacking and defending their bases with no pesky looting phase in between.
Instead, select your base and use Trader Flynn to upgrade your weapons and equipment in a round based format. After each round, you’ll switch sides between attacking and defending. Your base walls and generators will be repaired, and you’ll be rewarded some Vesper to spend at the Trader, who will have different offers after every round. And don’t worry about buying armor – everyone has the same armor, and it will escalate in rarity as the rounds progress.
Raid Rush will be an interesting experiment to see if Highguard can be more appealing to players if they don’t have to wrap their heads around all of the map exploration, looting, and capture the flag mechanics in the first two thirds of each match. Personally, those are my favorite parts. One of the best things about Highguard are its mounts and those won’t be a part of Raid Rush at all.
The new update will also re-balance a few items and weapons. The Revive Amulet now gives a much smaller speed boost to resurrecting fallen allies and the Vanguard, by far the most dominate rifle in the game, has had its long range damage taken down a notch. Similarly, the Dynasty, which has some wicked recoil, will now do increased damage to make up for the unwieldiness of it.
Highguard is hanging on by a thread
If you play Highguard multiple times a week like I still do, the balance changes are good ones and the new mode will be interesting to try out, even if it’s fundamentally not what I want out of the game. But most people who gave it a shot at launch aren’t still playing. This week’s update is another incremental update that does little to address the lack of items and heroes the game needs to in order to feel more fully featured.
The game’s concurrent numbers on Steam have continued to fall off a cliff. Highguard started February at 15,000 concurrent players daily on PC. It’s now bobbling around just 500. The game seems to be doing better on console. Mat Piscatella shared with Kotaku that according to the Circana Player Engagement Tracker, Highguard was the 34th most played game on PS5 in the U.S. for the week ending February 14 based on weekly active users.
Anecdotally, I’ve never waited more than a few seconds during matchmaking on console, so despite all of the grim forecasts, it certainly doesn’t feel like a dead game on console yet. I would love for Highguard to recover somehow because, despite its shortcomings, I’ve been having a great time playing it. But games need tons of runway or a major momentum shifting boost, and so far Highguard doesn’t have either of those.
