Highguard Gets First Major Update Since Launch (PS5 and Xbox Players Will Be Happy)

The first substantial update for Highguard has now gone live. Since its release earlier this week, the reception to Highguard has been pretty mixed. While some have liked the multiplayer shooter’s unique format and gunplay, others have made clear that they think some pretty substantial changes need to be made in order to ensure that the game has a long lifespan. Luckily, developer Wildlight Entertainment seems to have been quick to take this feedback into account and is already addressing some complaints with this new patch.

Downloadable now for PS5, Xbox, and PC, update version 1.0.4 for Highguard rectifies one major criticism for those playing on consoles. Specifically, this update has added an FOV slider, which will allow players on PS5 and Xbox to now choose how they want the game to look when playing. This omission was one that baffled many at launch for Highguard, so it’s good to see that it’s now in the game.

Other than this, Wildlight has also added a toggle option for crouching, which was another gameplay criticism that Highguard players had almost immediately. Moving forward, Wildlight says that it already has some larger optimization upgrades for Highguard, but these won’t be coming about for a few more days.

In the interim, to get a look at everything that has been done to Highguard with this new update today, you can find the full patch notes below.

Highguard Update 1.0.4 Patch Notes

Settings Improvements

Note: in an effort to release these changes to our players as quickly as possible, a number of menu options are not yet localized in languages other than English. Properly localized settings will be prepared for a future patch.

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.