Ahead of Highguard‘s impeding shutdown on March 12th, developers Wildlight have released the big final update they mentioned when delivering the news of the shooter’s forthcoming demise. Pulled together in short order by the “skeleton crew” left behind following recent layoffs at developers Wildlight, the update delivers skill trees, a new gun, and a new warden.
As detailed in a Steam post from the studio, the new warden’s called Koldo. He’s a “lost soul from long before the continent disappeared, trapped inside a suit of armor” and his powers revolve around using his soul to shield allies from harm. The new gun, meanwhile, is dubbed the Switchback. It’s a double-barrel shotgun designed to be effective in both long range and close quarters fights, by switching between shotgun and marksman rifle modes depending on whether you’re aiming down its sights.
Beyond those are the new skill trees and account progression mechanics, which it’s a shame folks won’t have much time to dig into ahead of the game going offline next week. The progression allows you to work your way up from level zero to 100, while the skill tree lets you spec into one of four classes – Raider, Harvester, Treasure Hunter, and Protector. Raiders are all about maxing out combat effectiveness during raids, Harvesters are moulded around sucking up vesper to charge their axes, Treasure Hunters are hidden chest-finding salespeople, while Protectors are geared towards defending bases and allies.
“Props to the skeleton crew at Wildlight for wanting to finish it and ship it to our remaining players, even if it only gets played by a few thousand people,” Highguard creative director Jason McCord wrote in a post about the update. “They weren’t asked to. They asked if they could finish it up and get it out there.”
In a reply to someone asking why this stuff didn’t make it into the launch version of the game, he added that none of it was done at that point, with the skill trees needing the most work. “The team crunched the last few weeks to get it done,” the developer explained. “Some stuff (Koldo, Switchback) was partially done, scheduled for future seasons. The team picked the stuff that was closest to completion and finished it up.” As a result, McCord admitted that the update’s additions remain “compromised to some degree”, but this is limited to the likes of Koldo missing some skins, emotes, and audio files. So, in the dev’s estimation, it isn’t stuff which should substantially impact the experience of playing with the fresh stuff.
With Highguard’s shutdown set for March 12th, if you fancy diving in one last time to try out this final update, you’ve got one more weekend and a smattering of weekdays. Well, that’s assuming you’re reading this not long after it’s published, rather than on the evening of March 11th.
