Developers at Highguard studio Wildlight Entertainment won’t claim they’re creating a new subgenre in the online shooter space, but it certainly seems that way.
Wildlight describes Highguard, out now for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, as a “PvP raid shooter.” Its singular game mode pits two teams of three players against one another in a fight to control the Shieldbreaker, a weapon that can tear down the enemy base’s shield. Think of this phase as reverse capture the flag; instead of bringing the Shieldbreaker to your base, you’re rushing to your opponents’ to tear down their shield. Once down, you’ll infiltrate that base and start trying to blow up objectives, like in Call of Duty’s Demolition modes.
“[‘Raid shooter’ is] sort of a marketing thing that I don’t like to think about, because the reality is that we just sat down and tried to make something new. In the end, we were like, ‘Shit, we have to call it something,’” design and creative director Jason McCord told gamexplore at a press preview event hosted by Wildlight in Los Angeles.
“I wouldn’t say that we’re trying to create a new genre or anything. It’s really just that there’s no other way to describe it,” co-founder, studio head, and game director Chad Grenier said. “So we’re calling it a raid shooter. If other people want to make a raid shooter, we’d be flattered. But we’re not trying to do anything outside of just describing our game.”
For players, the “raid shooter” mode may be a lot to take in at first and will take time to learn, just like how it took Wildlight years to finally hone in on that mode. “We’re sort of just discovering the important parts of it,” lead game designer Carlos Pineda said. “Even though we’ve played it for two years, that’s a baby amount of time.”
Wildlight took a winding road to settle on Highguard’s structure of two teams of three players clashing with one another. At one point, a match included eight teams, each with their own base. “It was chaos,” McCord said.
“It would be two-and-a-half hour matches and no winner. And we’re just like, ‘What is this game?’ So we kept bringing it down and scoping it down,” Pineda added. Scaling back the scope also applied to the team compositions; Wildlight experimented with 4v4, 5v5, and 6v6 configurations before settling on 3v3, which Pineda said is the right amount to ensure every player can have a grasp on what’s happening during intense and chaotic clashes.
The maps remained large throughout development, however, and that ample space allowed teams to gear up at the start of matches without the pressure of an enemy right on top of them. Mounts for traversal, like a bear or horse, came at a later date. “We were just running around the maps really fast because we needed to get to these places faster,” McCord said. “Then one of our designers prototyped a bear and you were riding a bear around. […] We were like, ‘This is cool, actually. There’s a fantasy here of riding through the world with your fantastic animal.’ So, at that point, I was like, ‘Let’s lock that in and try to make that great.’”
The mounts aren’t the only fantastical elements of Highguard. Its world as a whole is a blend of fantasy staples, like magic, and military aesthetics and weapons. “We like guns that feel and sound real and meaty and shoot real bullets. So we started there, and then we didn’t want to make sci-fi for our whole lives,” McCord explained.
Wildlight’s developers wondered how else they could express their creativity, and fantasy was the answer. But finding the right balance between fantastical and military elements was a tricky balancing act. “If you go too far in either direction, I feel like you kind of miss what we’re trying to do,” McCord said. “Everything that we make, every mechanic, is judged on the razor of, ‘Is this going to go tech or is it going to go fantasy?’”
He described the level of technology in Highguard’s fantasy realm as “World War I Plus Plus. […] Imagine tech just stops there, but they keep making better versions of it. We can have radar and radio that’s really good, but we can’t have wi-fi and we can’t have screens anywhere, really.”
Despite fantasy playing a big role in Highguard’s world, don’t expect any magic wands or anything else to take the place of guns. “I called it ‘no magic hands,’ no shooting from the hands,” McCord said. Those assault rifles are here to stay, partly because Wildlight loves them, and partly because players can immediately recognize and understand them.
Though Highguard features eight playable characters, called Wardens, Wildlight didn’t set out to make a hero shooter. Instead, the focus was on crafting a new game mode and ensuring every match felt different. “For a while, actually we were pretty cagey about it. We were like, ‘Yeah, people don’t really like heroes,’” Pineda said. He mentioned how Wildlight considered downplaying the hero shooter aspect of Highguard, but ultimately “[the heroes] make the game better, and that’s really the important part.”
He noted how the heroes are in service of the game mode, not the other way around. “So whatever unique things you’re doing in this mode, you can sort of create new abilities that help supplement that,” Pineda said. Different heroes have abilities that help in various phases of the game, like Scarlet’s ability to vanish walls, making infiltrating a base easier.
Not everything from years of development is going to make it into the final game. At the start of a Highguard match, you’ll choose a pre-built base to fortify and defend, but that wasn’t always the case. “At one point in time, there were a bit more base building elements in the game,” Grenier said. “We found ourselves just trying to get through it as quick as possible because we wanted to just go attack and do the loop that’s in the game now. […] When we abandoned [base building], it was clear that the game without it was better.”
Aside from divulging the abandoned base-building elements, the developers were cagey about what was left on the cutting room floor. They teased that ideas they’ve batted around might make it into Highguard down the line in future Episodes (what Highguard’s seasons are called) as added content or limited-time game modes.
In fact, horse girls might want to keep their eyes on Highguard. “Something that we haven’t started yet that’s been floating around at the studio is like horse racing and things like that,” Grenier said. “I mean, the possibilities are endless.”
