Highguard’s First Patch Brings Much-Requested Fixes, But PC Optimization Is Still Being Worked On

5 days ago 7

Highguard players were aghast that the raid hero shooter launched without an FOV slider on console. Well, now it has one, and some other small fixes to help with its launch week woes.

“We’ve just pushed out a patch with a number of improvements, including FoV sliders for consoles, toggle options for ADS and Crouch, many video settings, and more,” reads the 1.0.4 update from Wildlight Entertainment. “The team is also working on optimization improvements, they just need a few more days to cook.”

Players on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S can now adjust the field-of-view to 110, while a number of new visual settings help PC players limit rendering load to improve framerate. You can’t yet disable motion blur and depth of field but that’s coming down the road. A gnarly bug on PS5 that was crashing the game after leaving matches has also been addressed.

The first round of many promised improvements comes as Highguard struggles to hang on to its slice of multiplayer mindshare after coming to PC and console earlier this week. An avalanche of negative reviews on Steam and the collapse of the concurrent player numbers on PC aren’t promising, but I’ve also heard anecdotally from friends on console that they’ve been enjoying it more as they continue playing and come to understand the nuances of the genre mashup.

Here are the full Highguard 1.0.4 Patch Notes:

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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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.

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