Although it only debuted on January 26, Highguard has already received its first significant technical overhaul. With the January 29 update, Wildlight Entertainment is moving aggressively to resolve the friction points identified by the community following the free-to-play raid shooter’s turbulent launch. Despite earning a “mostly negative” rating on Steam across more than 22,000 reviews, the title shows promise, and the developers are working tirelessly to reverse the current narrative. While changing public perception is a monumental task, the team at Wildlight is prioritizing rapid-fire optimizations and feature requests to stabilize the experience.
“Hey Wardens! We’ve deployed a new patch featuring several key refinements, such as Field of View (FoV) sliders for consoles, toggle settings for ADS and Crouching, and expanded video configurations,” the Wildlight team announced. They also noted that further performance-oriented “cooking” is happening behind the scenes, with more improvements slated for the coming days.
The developers—many of whom are Respawn Entertainment veterans with years of experience on Apex Legends—announced the patch earlier this week. Drawing on lessons learned from past major launches, the studio is dedicated to a proactive post-launch roadmap to ensure Highguard finds its footing.
Below are the comprehensive patch notes for Highguard version 1.0.4:
Settings & Quality of Life
Note: To deliver these updates as quickly as possible, some menu options are currently only available in English. Full localization for all supported languages will be integrated in a subsequent update.
Input Configurations
- Crouch Behavior: Players on all platforms can now choose between “Hold” and “Toggle” for crouching.
- ADS Behavior: PC players now have “Hold” or “Toggle” options for Aiming Down Sights.
Developer Note: Currently, toggling ADS and then sprinting (Shift on PC/Left Stick on Controller) triggers a scope swap. This interaction can be jarring on controllers. While PC players can rebind this, console users cannot yet. We are working on a more elegant solution for console players before enabling ADS toggling on those platforms.
Visual & Performance Adjustments
- Console FoV: Players on console can now increase their Field of View up to 110.
- Scalability Tweaks: “Low” settings for shadows and reflections have been further optimized to prioritize framerates on lower-end hardware.
- Atmospherics: Selecting the “Low” shadow setting will now automatically disable volumetric fog to boost performance.
- View Distance Quality: A new setting for skeletal mesh Level of Detail (LOD) has been added to help balance CPU and GPU load.
Players can now independently toggle the following graphical features:
- Anisotropic Materials
- Chromatic Aberration
- Bloom
Note: Motion Blur and Depth of Field toggles are undergoing further stability testing and will be added to the menu shortly.
- DLSS Presets: Users with NVIDIA hardware can now manually select DLSS presets (more descriptive labels coming soon).
- Global Illumination: This can now be set to “Off” to maximize hardware resources.
- Laptop Fix: Addressed a bug where laptop users were being capped at 60 FPS regardless of their chosen settings.
Stability & Bug Fixes
This update addresses critical crashes occurring in the following instances:
- Disconnecting or leaving a match on PlayStation 5 during specific input states.
- Infinite loading or crashing on PCs utilizing slower HDD storage devices.
Additional refinements have been made to social features and backend matchmaking:
- Social Connectivity: Friend lists now update in real-time after accepting requests, and Xbox “Presence” status is now reporting accurately.
- Stability Milestones: The most frequent crash triggers have been eliminated, resulting in a 90% reduction in total reported crashes.
Source: Polygon
