The Internet Was Wrong About HighGuard

0:13What's good everybody? It's your boy Khalif and I just came back from LA to check out the new free to play shooter from wildlife entertainment high guard coming to you from the folks who cut their teeth making games like apex legends and titanfall i got a chance to sit down with the team behind it design and creative director jason mccord i got to hang out with carlos panetta who is a lead designer vp of product and design jason torfin and lead designer mohammed alavi people who have been in the trenches of live service games for a long time they're trying something very very different here. And look, I know what you've been thinking.

0:47It's another shooter in 2026. We've already got games like Apex Legends. We've already got games like Call of Duty and Valorant. And what is this thing kind of doing that's making it feel different in the space in a real way? And I think after seeing the trailer at the Game Awards and getting a hands-on at this exclusive preview event last week, I walked in excited and feeling really cool about what we got a chance to see and left feeling really impressed with not only what this game is trying to do, but I think it is really bringing something special and is probably the freshest idea I've seen in the shooter space in a very, very, very long time.

1:26So, you know, talking to the team, they spoke about how four years ago they were in a room asking this very simple question of like, what are we going to make? And Jason McCord, the design and creative director said they knew they wanted to make it a shooter because they're really good at that. You knew that they wanted to make it multiplayer because they're also really good at that. But the question was, what kind of game could it be that would actually matter? And what he shared was this. He said the most important thing that it had to do was to stand out from the rest of the crowd. He said we knew whatever was going to wind up being was going to have to be something that people were going to care about.

2:00And they had to make it something that people had never really seen before. And after getting a chance to play the game and getting a chance some time with it, you know, and them saying, you know, we don't want to make Apex Legends 2.0, they really nailed it. I think they really have something special here in a way that does stand out in a way that offers something very, very new. We knew that there was going to be a lot of ambition here. We knew there was going to be a lot of space here to kind of build on what they had previously and what some of the pedigree was. But execution was going to be the thing that actually mattered.

2:33and what was it going to wind up being when they actually got it in the hands of fans. So what did they actually build here in High Guard? So High Guard is a raid shooter. It is a new kind of genre in the shooter space. And it breaks down into these matches that have multiple phases. Every warden is unique and so is every base. Try them out and in no time you'll find the base that best suits your unique skills and tactics. Now, once you've settled into a base, the defensive phase will begin.

3:10Here you'll have a short window to change your loadout and secure the base. The generators in your base are very important. They're usually found deep inside, surrounded by destructible walls. It's best to use your wall reinforcements to protect those generators. That's the easiest place to start securing your base. When the dome unlocks, I'll give you the signal and we're off. Our strategy for each battle has three phases. Phase 1, gear up. Phase 2, intercept. And lastly, Phase 3, raid. I highly recommend gathering armor and upgrading your weapons first. The Vigil has them scattered around. Loot all the resources you can before charging into a fight.

4:02Don't forget to harvest Vesper you find around as well. You'll need this currency to buy better weapons, raid tools, and armor upgrades from Trader Flynn. Once you have the Shieldbreaker, rally up your team and ride out to the enemy base. This marks the beginning of Phase 2, Intercept. In the Intercept phase, whoever has the Shieldbreaker will be trying to ride with it to the opposing base and break in. and the other team tries to stop them. Again, teamwork is invaluable. Stick together. These intercept battles can make or break who gets to plant the Shieldbreaker and start a raid. Be careful not to get wiped out.

4:42If you do, you will drop the Shieldbreaker and hand it right over to the enemy. If no one plants before our time window runs out, we'll find ourselves in a final stretch of overtime. During this stretch, no one will be able to respawn. This makes it all about eliminating the enemy team. You can still plant, but you should be cautious and try not to let our clock run out. If it does, the Shieldbreaker will plant itself to the nearest base for zero damage, and the raid will begin.

5:17During a raid, you'll need to work together to successfully break through and sabotage generators. If you're falling behind and you really need to take this raid, go for the Anchor Stone. Take out the heart of the base for instant victory. Be smart. Plan with your team. Coordinate and unite those powers for devastating effect. In the end, the key to winning is working together, upgrading your gear and securing the Shieldbreaker. Work on mastering these tips and you will become a true Warden of High Guard. Now, mind you, in between deaths, you can actually go and buy more weapons. You can buy more shields.

6:01You can buy more upgrades to your character. But also around the world is a vendor called Flynn. Just call me Flynn. First steps just ahead. See what you're made of. Flynn is all around the place. He has this magical power to kind of teleport himself all around the world. There's one in your base. There are some around the world. There, um, this, this, this, uh, this resource called Vesper that you wind up getting. That is the kind of currency of the world is how you buy upgrades or buy weapons or buy, you know, almost Valorant style, uh, um, kind of shop, uh, stuff that happens in between those rounds and in game so that you are, if you're behind, or if you're looting a bunch and you're getting those resources a ton, you can level up your character mid round to have an advantage.

6:46So it's a matter of like, are you saving up your money to be able to, you know, level yourself up in a later round? Are you kind of making sure that you're getting the weapons that you love early on in fights so that you're able to take out enemies in the way that you want? Are you looking to be able to get certain weapons that will help you break down walls faster? Because there are versions of weapons that do specifically damage for walls and things like that. It's a lot of tactical senses that you need to kind of be paying attention to in the middle of every round. And every round, then once you've gotten your other team down to zero, that is the win condition for that particular thing.

7:27Every round that I got a chance to play felt good. Every moment that I was kind of in the space and we were having that back and forth between really good gunfights and, you know, getting in and looting up and learning the maps and figuring out what rooms you wanted to fortify that made it harder for teams to kind of get in, learning where choke points were in different maps, learning what vanguards would work best in certain spots because you want some that would, you know, hold off and kind of keep you out of spaces and do some area of denial stuff. You had some that were really just more kind of offensive.

8:05Like one, uh, has this ability to kind of throw up these ice walls. One has this ability to kind of throw it on these firestorms and kind of keep you out of spots and do some damage. But one of the things that was really cool about the, the way that they talked about these abilities that is, it wasn't like destiny where, you know, you hit a button and your super is the thing that, that, that gets you killed and you can just wipe out a team with that thing. What they talked about was making it really strategic so that the onus was on you getting into gunfights. The guns are the star of this game.

8:34The abilities are really cool and they do a lot of different and fun stuff, but those are additive in comparison to being the thing that will get you multiple kills in a round, especially with these 3v3 fights. You want that thing to feel a lot more cohesive and you want that to feel like you have a chance to be able to get into those fights and not feel like you just got supered every time that you went in. So they're additive. They actually are helping to, you know, either, you know, uh, give you something to think about as a combatant. Think, think about how you want to position, think about how you want to, again, keep people out of areas, bring people closer, you know, work through, walk through, uh, uh, getting down bases a little bit faster.

9:15Some of those things are really there of resource management or gathering resources, some of those characters are able to gather resources a little bit faster with some of the stuff that they have in their kit. But so it winds up being all of those pieces together that work really, really well within the structure of every match. We had a blast. We were talking so much crap. We were playing a bunch of folks who were press folks. We wind up getting sat next to and, you know, front to back where we were playing a lot of the kind of funny kids. So I was playing with Andy and Mike and Blessing, and we were just like running and talking a whole bunch of crap and having so much fun.

9:49It was chaotic, but once you got the first kind of matches through and you understood the loop, it was fast. Like the matches range from like eight minutes to like almost 30 minutes. And we had a full match where we went back and forth. We were down to five health on each one of our bases. And we finished that match. The kind of funny kids won. and we looked at the timing on the end of the round charter and it was like 27 minutes. And it didn't feel like that at all. It felt like we had finished that match in like 15 minutes because of how chaotic and everything felt. But it all felt like the game in every single aspect was telling you exactly what to do next, which was a really smart thing.

10:37Like we're going to share in the video or maybe in another video, the kind of like beginning onboarding video that they have in the game. So like when you go in and you go into training, it tells you exactly what each phase is, tells you exactly what the wardens are, tells you what Flynn does and his purpose, tells you what Vesper is, tells you how to get to the generators and what you should be doing in those moments. But the game through each phase of a match is telling you exactly what you should be doing next. It's like, this is now the phase where you should be fortifying your tower. Here's the next spot where you got to go get the shield breaker.

11:14Now you got the shield breaker and now you're ready to go raid in this next phase. It's really smartly done in the way that it onboards you and it's really smart in the way that it continues to reinforce what the gameplay loop is supposed to be for that specific part of the match. I think it's really really smart. I think it's really brilliant in the way that they've kind of put that together and you can tell again it's like really really thoughtful from the team. Like you can tell that they sat through many, many iterative sessions and learned what feels good here. How do we convey this to a team?

11:47How do we convey this to players in a way that they automatically are kind of getting this? They're learning through repetition and they're learning through the process of doing and they're learning through the process of playing each match. And each match felt extremely different, even though, you know, those parts of the main phases are there, each match felt very different. We had matches that were kind of more horseback written or horseback kind of focused or not all horses, but you can get a Griffin. You can get a bear. You can get some other cool stuff. You get a battle cat almost. But those felt very different.

12:23Every match felt different. Some of them were blitzes. We were able to get things done really quickly and win really fast. Some of them were much longer and you had that kind of push and pull. and you were learning a lot through every different match where you were learning like, oh, maybe when the shield breaker is starting to generate, maybe we wait until it's fully done and then we go get it. So that gives us more time to loot. Maybe we go early and we do like Rainbow Six Siege style where you, instead of fortifying some walls, you leave those walls open or you break those open early. So you have a line of sight when people are coming to you to be able to fight.

12:58Oh, when the shield breaker has hit your base and they're starting to siege you and starting to get into the raid, oh, the shield is still there and you can't shoot out of it. Maybe if you flank around, you'll get a flanking position so that when it does open, you then have another position where you can go fight and maybe get a couple of kills early. What is it like when you're reviving your teammates? Because that's a big part of the game too, where you get these re the chance to revive where you die, you get these orbs that pop up, which are your dead bodies. And if it's your teammates, you can revive them and not let them have to go respawn.

13:35And you can also kill, you know, the, the enemy's orbs that they have to respawn. The teams can't re respawn them, uh, on their own. It's a lot of tactics, but it all feels really cohesive. And that was the part that, that came through in every match. So, you know, I think there's a lot of good stuff in that mix for what the gameplay is, but I think what really impressed me was the way that the team was thinking about the future of this game. They are thinking about this in a much bigger and broader way. And some of the stuff that they talked about in terms of their roadmap were really, really, really impressive.

14:12So they talked about what you're going to get in the first year of the game. You get five maps, six bases, eight wardens, three mount types, 10 weapons with full mod systems, and three raid tools. So they talked a little bit about the battle pass as well, which they called the war chest, and that is going to be completely free. So you don't have to pay for that at all. And I know you're kind of thinking like, all right, so how are they going to catch me? It's a free-to-play game. What are they going to squeeze us with? And when talking to Jason Torfin, the head of product, he said, we wanted to make sure that the store was going to be something that the players want to experience.

14:46They said they want to make sure that there are, you know, no pay to win stuff. It's all cosmetic, direct purchase, no loot boxes, no RNG, so that you don't have that FOMO. So the items don't disappear and everything's going to be, you know, priced between nine and $20. And the most expensive thing that you can get is a$20 amount, which looks really, really sexy. So the war chests are nine bucks. They have 44 items in each of them and they don't expire, which I love. So you can go back to old, uh, old war chests and purchase them, uh, if you missed any of them. So for the free players, there's a trading post, uh, where you get these kinds of weekly cosmetics that you can earn.

15:27And it feels really, you know, smartly done. It doesn't feel exploitative in any of the ways that you usually see within these spaces, but you know, what the real question is going to wind up being is all right. So you've gotten the first kind of loot boxes in, uh, you've gotten those things in that space. You have your war chest. The thing that is the kind of bane in the existence for most live service games is how far along will you have to wait for new stuff? Uh, do they feel like they have a good roadmap in terms of what they're kind of bringing to the table, you know, in those cadences when new stuff is coming.

16:00And that was going to be the part that we were really like, so what are you going to do? How are you going to build out all this stuff for, for this long of a time, uh, when you know that that players really want a lot of stuff often and they run through content really, really quickly. And one of the conversations that came up out of that was the fact that they had said that they have been preparing for live service for years. They had seen what happened in Apex and they knew that they couldn't do that again and they need to be able to make sure they have enough stuff. So episode two is gonna drop two weeks right after launch.

16:29So that means you get a new warden, a new map, a new ranked mode, and you're gonna get a new mount. So then every two months, a new episode will drop and then within each episode, you'll get more content within that space. Jason Torvin said like, this is all free to the players. There's no paid stuff here referring to the gameplay affecting combat, uh, content. Um, and, and the roadmap was really, really deep. It was a lot of stuff in here that made you feel like, okay, we have a ton of stuff to go. We have a lot of stuff that's going to be coming. So I feel like for folks who are worried about, is this game going to actually have enough stuff to continue to go?

17:05And you're going to automatically have what you're having right now in the, in the arc Raiders, uh, community, which is we need more stuff because of the pedigree. And because of all the things they have been talking about over the past, you know, a couple of years working at those other studios and working on those other games, they have planned for a lot of that. They have already thought those things out and they have a full year's worth of content already kind of in the hopper stuff. That's close to being finished stuff. That's a little bit further out, but being worked on everything is already being worked on prototypes for new stuff is going to be worked on already limited time time mode stuff is kind of already in the mix they have a lot of understanding of what it takes to make a live service game work and they've already cut a lot of the potential worry off at the past by building and having all those things ready and having a lot of those discussions internally about what those things are going to look like for players moving down the line so i am super excited about that because that means that we don't really have to think about what's the new stuff that's coming It'll be cool when it drops and we know that it will be dropping, but that's the crux of it.

18:08We know it's coming. We know what's going to be dropping. We know what's going to be here for players. We know what's going to be here for folks to be able to enjoy it. And that is a breath of fresh air. That really tells me that they've thought about making sure players are in a good spot financially and you're not spending a ton of money in game. And also they're not like throwing stuff at you. Like even in the UI, it doesn't feel like they're trying to sell you a lot. They're not trying to like throw sales at you. They're not trying to throw that like message of the day where they're like, go buy all the stuff that's in the store.

18:37It's a very low key in the way that they're doing it because they're focusing on the gameplay and they're focusing on the game being good. And they're focusing on you having a good time as a player. I love that philosophy. It really did speak to me in a really good way that they understood what live service is and what that means for players in a way that you haven't really seen in a long period of time. And it gave me a lot of love for the folks who were thinking about it in those ways because it really does show that they get it. So, you know, one of the big questions too, I think that the community and everybody else on the internet has been talking about has been, so what happened with the game awards?

19:12And do you feel like you, you know, got the wrong response from the internet? And it was really cool to be able to talk to Jason about, Jason Torfinn about that. And he kind of talked about it in a way that was like, and McCord spoke about this too, was like, you know, the reception isn't exactly what we wanted. You know, there was a lot of hate that was in that mix, but, you know, we wanted to announce the game. And the original idea was that they were literally going to shadow drop it. They were going to not do a lot of marketing prior. They were going to shadow drop it. They had talked about, which was a, which was a mind blowing statement was two years ago, they had basically picked what their, their launch date was and they're hitting their launch date.

19:50Like they talked about wild light being a studio of shippers. Like they set a date and they land that date. So that means for, for us as players, that tells me that again, speaking about stuff in the roadmap, like they're going to hit their dates when they have stuff to go. And they really scope everything in a really smart way so that they don't miss deadlines for things, which is a cool thing in and of itself. They also talked a lot about, you know, what it was like to be, what it's like to be this kind of independent studio. They're not talking about big publishers and not, you know, beholden to big publishers and to stockholders in those ways and how that gives them a lot of freedom to not only be nimble, but also find good ways to be really, really responsive to the community.

20:31which I think is really important. It's really smart again from that team to have seen a lot of the ways that, you know, amongst that 104 person team, you know, that they are looking at the ways that studios work and some of the missteps that have happened in their own careers across studios that they worked at and trying to be the opposite of that and trying to find good ways to bring home this really good feeling of like, these games are for you. These games are meant to be spaces for you to have fun for, again, for folks who want to be in that, in that spectrum of casual, the sweaty, they're looking to, to be able to give you multiple layers of this game that they can build for players and, and find those things, uh, for you.

21:15And it was really refreshing to be able to see, you know, developers talk really candidly about what that reception was and, and, and how it kind of vibed in all of those, in all of those things. Um, and it showed that they are again, you know, taking all of that feedback in. So I'm sure that once things need tuning or any of that stuff, that they'll be able to really do those things in a smart way because they're building and standing up a lot of prototypes really quickly. They have a ton of folks in that studio who do that work really well, and they have places to play that aren't money driven because they're able to figure out good ways to, to, to, to think back about the things that they had done before and apply those to, to high guard in this way.

21:54Um, so that was a cool moment to be able to hear them be really frank about what that was. Um, but they want the game to speak for itself. And I think that's the reason why we didn't see a big marketing push in the ways that people traditionally have been talking about it on the internet, uh, Forbes and all these other places like that about, Oh my God, they didn't say anything for a whole month after the game awards. And Oh my God, what does that mean? Is the game dead? And also the kind of stuff, which I think brings me to my last point for, for this video, which is again, I have been shouting from the heavens that the way that we cover games in 2025, 2026 is a little bit broken.

22:31I think the, the need to have a 24 seven chatter cycle about content all the time, the need to feel like we need to say every single thing that's in our heads, um, doesn't necessarily do anything smartly for the industry. It doesn't do things for the studios that we cover. I think there was a lot of chatter about, you know, is this game going to fail? And I think a lot of that, to be honest, sure was driven from the community, but the folks who were the kind of most stalwart asking those questions were folks in the press, were folks in gaming press, were folks in the gaming media who are fanning the flames and giving the audience more fuel to the fire for things that didn't really matter.

23:14We just could have waited. like there's a space where we just could have waited for for wildlife to do what they wanted to do especially knowing the pedigree of what they did the first time with apex which was basically a shadow drop and it worked pretty well i mean apex did a really damn good uh set of numbers over the years and still doing uh still has a pretty decent community in that respect but we spent so much time trying to figure out ways to connect failure to a thing that we had no information about until literally last week, which is fine. I think it's okay. Multiple teams have various ways that they want to do their marketing.

23:56And we as players, sure, we have this want to be able to see everything as fast as you possibly can and automatically want everything to be exactly the way that we want it. But also teams have the ability to kind of do that. And we don't have to freak out and make it feel like everything is going to fail before we've given it a chance to even strive or even thrive. It's a bad, bad, bad practice that I continue to see across our industry. And it frustrates me because I feel like those people should know better. And they don't. And it's really frustrating in that respect. So that's one aspect. Two, I want to give props to Jeff Keighley.

24:32Jeff Keighley, he was at the event. We got a chance to say hello and chop it up and say, hey. he was in the he was in the the studio playing with us and and and hooting and hollering with everybody else and it was really nice to be able to see him also get a win because there was this silly unreasonable unnecessary conversation about like did a high guard get their spot in the game awards because they paid for it or because it was a spot that was given for free i have worked in the industry and worked on a couple of projects where discussions about like how do you get into the game awards and what does that mean?

25:07And all that stuff happens. But when, if Jeff put this game into the show for free, that tells me that he believed in it and he had a feeling and he talked about that on the, on the game boards. And he had a feeling about this game. That was one that was like, well, hell, if this game is going to play like this and feel like this, we should show it to the world and we should give it a spot in the game awards, the biggest show on the planet to be able to showcase what this game is potentially going to be. Now, mind you, the trailer wasn't the best trailer. And even the folks on the team, you know, talked about like, we wanted to show more, but where it fit into the show, you couldn't really do that.