After a rocky launch, Highguard has received its first substantial update aimed at eliminating the main issues that plagued the release, the developer Wildlight announced on X. The patch represents the studio’s initial large-scale response to widespread player complaints after the game debuted.
According to the update notes, the patch fixes several serious bugs, including a fault that limited laptop frame rates to 60 FPS and a problem that prevented friends from appearing correctly online. Wildlight also reported a dramatic reduction in crashes — by their estimate, crashes have fallen by roughly 90 percent following the update.
The new build broadens the available graphics settings. Players can now manually turn off chromatic aberration and anisotropic materials, select additional DLSS presets, and entirely disable global illumination. Wildlight added that safe options for disabling motion blur and depth of field are still under development and require more testing before they are shipped to players.
Highguard reached a peak concurrent online audience of about 97,000 at launch, but that number fell roughly tenfold within a day and has continued to decline since. User feedback has been overwhelmingly negative on aggregate review sites: at the time of publication, the average user score on Metacritic stood at 2.2, which the developers noted is the lowest user rating among 2026 releases so far.
The patch is intended to stabilize the game and address the most disruptive issues players encountered at release. Wildlight’s comments indicate ongoing work to refine additional graphical toggles and further reduce instability as they monitor player reports and feedback.