Highguard just received a crucial launch week patch to help address a handful of issues and improve the free-to-play hero shooter in its opening days.
Highguard Launch Week
Highguard console players can breathe a sigh of relief with the knowledge that FOV (field of view) sliders are now in place for the free-to-play hero shooter. PS5 and Xbox players can now significantly increase their peripheral awareness during team fights. After a surprising end of show spotlight at The Game Awards 2025, many gamers have been waiting to see how the launch of Highguard would play out.
The title is now live after a January 26 release date, but the game’s community has been quick to offer a lot of constructive feedback to the team at Wildlight Entertainment. Luckily, the developers seem to be listening and a week one patch is already addressing a handful of the complaints that players have had.
The first patch targets crash and bug fixes, along with some improvements to game input settings and video settings. Players can find the detailed patch notes below.
Highguard Full Patch Notes
Game Input Settings
- Added the ability to set Crouch to Hold or Toggle for all platforms.
- Added the ability to set Aim Down Sights to Hold or Toggle for PC only (for now).
Toggling into ADS then tapping Sprint (shift on PC, left stick on controller) will swap your scope. This is disorienting on controller. PC players are recommended to rebind scope swap if using Toggle ADS. We will continue to look into adding this for console players who can’t rebind buttons yet, but we will need more time.
Video Settings
- Console users can now adjust FoV to 110.
- Low scalability settings for shadows and reflections are tuned for even more performance at the cost of some image quality.
- Low shadow setting now also disables volumetric fog.
- Added a new “View Distance Quality” setting that controls skeletal mesh LODs, which can be another useful control to tune GPU and CPU usage.
Players now have the ability to toggle the following features on or off, irrespective of other quality options:
- Anisotropic Materials
- Chromatic Aberration
- Bloom
Motion Blur and Depth of Field need more testing to disable safely. Look for these options very soon.
- DLSS users now have the ability to select a DLSS preset. More presets and better descriptions are coming in the next patch.
- Players can now select Off to disable Global Illumination entirely.
- Resolved an engine bug which could inadvertently throttled laptop users to 60 FPS regardless of frame rate settings.
Crash and Bug Fixes
This patch resolves crashes that could occur in the following scenarios
- Leaving a match on PS5 with an unexpected input state.
- Loading into matches on machines with slower storage devices.
A number of other bugs related to online user presence and matchmaking were also resolved.
- Friends now appear online correctly after accepting requests, and Xbox presence updates properly. Major crash fixes have reduced crashes by 90%, significantly improving stability.
- Friend status is fixed – players now appear online correctly and Xbox presence updates reliably. Our top crash issues are gone resulting in a 90% crash reduction.
It’s definitely a significant patch and the update addresses a handful of the most crucial issues that players were experiencing during launch week. Follow up patches will still be needed for further PC optimization, but this update is a good start and shows that the team is dedicated to improving the experience and listening to player feedback.
Highguard is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series consoles.
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