One of many builders behind Highguard says the concurrent participant depend for the brand new first-person shooter doesn’t want “to be tremendous big with a view to achieve success.”
As Highguard launches, previews are rolling out throughout quite a lot of totally different publications, together with GameSpot. A flurry of interviews with the sport’s builders are additionally revealing extra in regards to the recreation that is now in gamers’ fingers. Lead Designer Mohammad Alavi shared the aforementioned sentiment about participant depend in a bunch interview attended by PC Gamer, saying that Highguard discovering a core, passionate neighborhood that may develop is extra vital.
“Truthfully, we do not want [player counts] to be tremendous big with a view to achieve success,” he defined. “We’re a small crew. A six-player match [Highguard’s max player count at launch] shouldn’t be exhausting to seek out. What we’re actually hoping for is a core group of followers that love us. That can enable us to develop. Being the ire of the web hate machine sucks, however on the identical time, I attempt to simply give attention to making the most effective recreation I can and getting that recreation into individuals’s fingers. On the finish of the day, that is all that actually issues.”
Highguard is a brand new first-person shooter the place two groups of three “Wardens” compete to take down the opposing crew’s base. It encompasses a distinctive mixture of Overwatch’s playable heroes, Battlefield’s giant maps and destructible environments, and the horseback driving and magical fringe of a shooter like Paladins. Wildlight Leisure is asking this a “raid shooter,” possible banking on that distinct mixture of gameplay components permitting Highguard to stay out.
Nonetheless, at any time when a brand new live-service recreation launches, individuals love to right away verify Twitch viewership numbers and Steam concurrent participant counts (by way of SteamDB) to get a common thought of how profitable a recreation is. Though these statistics do not at all times paint a full image, they’ll rapidly form the web sentiment across the recreation.
Highguard has confronted an uphill battle ever because it bought backlash for being the ultimate reveal at The Recreation Awards 2025 and going nearly fully radio silent afterward. That mentioned, Highguard is not off to a nasty begin because it has already surpassed 97,000 concurrent gamers on SteamDB and 368,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch on the time of this writing.
These are numbers that high-profile live-service recreation flops like Harmony by no means even got here near matching. Which may even be greater than sufficient for Wildlight Leisure, particularly if a core neighborhood varieties and maintains itself round Highguard.