After playing a few hours of Highguard at a hands-on event in Los Angeles last week, I don’t think it’s my next FPS obsession. I do, however, respect the stance its developers at Wildlight Entertainment are taking with their debut game’s business model.
Highguard is free-to-play, it has cosmetic-only battle passes that never expire, new heroes and maps are free for all, and the most expensive itemsin its store at launch—like a legendary bear mount—are $20.
“We wanted to make a store that we as players want to experience. That means cosmetic only, direct purchase only, no FOMO, no pay for power. No pay to win, pay walling, no RNG, no loot boxes,” said VP of product and publishing Jason Torfin in a group interview with press.
Good news, but not all that notable. I wanted to know if Wildlight had a policy about a specific practice of live-service games: bombarding players with pop-up ads on every launch, between every match, and layered within every menu tab. Fortnite is a major free-to-play offender, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Battlefield 6 (both $70 games) are particularly aggressive about pop-up ads, going above and beyond to upsell an already-paying playerbase on gaudy $30 upgrades.
If I never decide a Highguard skin is worth the scratch, will the game punish me for it?
“We share your concerns,” Wildlight co-founder and game director Chad Grenier told PC Gamer. “You’ll see when you’re out there playing the game, what you see today is what we’re launching with.”
Grenier referred to the build of Highguard that I played in Los Angeles—chacter-driven menu backgrounds, a simple mode select screen, a store tab, but no ads outside the store itself.
“There’s no ads that we’re holding back for this event or anything like that. We’re not throwing anything in your face.”
In a group interview focused on monetization and updates, Torfin expanded.
“We have the most rudimentary message of the day system ever, because we want you to just enter the world and leave you the hell alone until you want to go look at [the store],” he said. “Our creative and design director Jason McCord is very passionate about that. Some games can make you feel like you’ve walked into something from Minority Report, where you’re just inundated with ads on all sides. We don’t want that.
“A lot of games, they’re making a gumball machine where you have to make a lot of fluff with only a couple of cool prizes in there. We’re not doing that. We’re making a toy store where you want to go in and see your favorite action figure on the shelf. When you’re ready, you go look at the back of the box, you look at all the cool stuff, and then you go buy it.”
Lead designer Mohammad Alavi chimed in: “Not doing loot boxes really helps with that. Like our artists are actually excited to make the MTX because they’re only making top tier stuff.”
Speaking of skins, Grenier told PC Gamer there are no plans for crossover skins that betray Highguard’s world.
“Generally speaking, this team likes to keep everything in the universe. You can see with our previous games like Apex, we were very careful in what we introduce to the game. Any collaborations need to be the right fit for the IP and our world,” Grenier said. “We’re very passionate about our IP and our world, and we have a lot of storytelling we want to do in-game and out-of-game in the future, and so, that makes injecting real world branding into it not necessarily the right fit.”
We’ll have more to say about Highguard, including some proper impressions, in the coming days.
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