After going all quiet on the digital entrance for six weeks, Wildlight Leisure’s free-to-play fantasy shooter Highguard is formally out on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Sequence X|S. When you had been involved concerning the recreation’s longevity, you possibly can relaxation straightforward as a result of the corporate’s co-founder and CEO mentioned it is not going anyplace.
Chatting with Variety on launch day–January 26–Dusty Welch mentioned that Highguard is nothing like Harmony or Overwatch (although it form of rhymes with the previous and is type of synonymous with the latter). Particularly, Welch famous that, not like the earlier two video games (which have been unceremoniously shut down), Highguard will not undergo the same destiny anytime quickly. (It is value mentioning that though Overwatch shut down, Overwatch 2 rose up as a substitute and has updates deliberate. Harmony, nonetheless, is lifeless and gone.)
“What we’re assured in is that we’re not going anyplace,” Welch defined. “We’re not going away. We as a workforce have numerous expertise in constructing franchises which have endurance. And this one, as [co-founder and game director Chad Grenier] alluded to, we have now a 12 months’s value of content material that is close to completion that’s going to interact an viewers for fairly a little bit of time. So we’re excited to have the ability to convey that. Now we have the expertise, however that mentioned, we’re humbled, and we hope folks love this–but we’re prepared to interact with them.”
Welch pointed to the year-one roadmap, which sees Highguard receiving an replace, generally known as “episodes,” each two months beginning in February. The forthcoming replace will add a ranked mode, a brand new mount, one other hero (referred to as “Wardens”), a brand new raid instrument, a further base, and a brand new map to blast associates and strangers on. Every of those episodes will function new content material like this.
With the sport formally out on consoles and PC, it is seemingly attracting a considerable viewers, reaching almost 100K concurrent gamers on Steam day-one. Though Wildlight Leisure is not involved with large participant numbers as a determinant of the sport’s success, the figures do bode nicely for a brand-new recreation from a brand-new studio–even if that studio is generally comprised of former Apex Legends and Titanfall of us.
In GameSpot’s Highguard preview, author Jordan Ramée referred to as it a “contemporary sufficient combo” to be its personal factor. He described the sport as a “a first-person shooter that follows each the attacker-versus-defender construction of Rainbow Six Siege and the lane-focused bomb-planting format of Valorant, however inside the a lot bigger objective-focused, base-destroying scope of the area battles of Star Wars Battlefront 2” you in all probability have not performed earlier than.