Highguard devs detail roadmap that corrects for Apex Legends mistakes

For one thing, Highguard already has a full year of planned content

Highguard may be Wildlight Entertainment’s debut game, but for many of the studio’s developers, it’s a second chance at launching a successful live service shooter on the right foot. Like approximately 60% of Wildlight’s roughly 100-person team, design lead Mohammad Alavi worked at Respawn Entertainment, developer of 2019’s Apex Legends. The battle royale game’s popularity at launch took Alavi and many others by surprise.

“I don't think it's any mystery that we launched Apex Legends and we were not ready,” Alavi said during a recent press event for Highguard attended by Polygon. “But we survived that fire and we learned a lot from it,” he said.

The “fire” was launching Apex without a clear vision for what would come next. The devs at Respawn were “a little bit caught with our pants down, like, ‘Oh no, we have to make more,’” lead game designer Carlos Pineda told Polygon. “We put everything out.”

That’s not the case for Highguard. During the preview event, Polygon spoke to multiple developers at Wildlight who explained how Highguard’s launch plan differs from the playbook we saw with Apex Legends. For instance, Wildlight has the first full year of content planned for its live service shooter, including new Wardens (the playable characters), weapons, and maps. “I think we've just gotten better at having a pipeline for that,” Pineda said.

After Apex Legends’s 2019 launch, Respawn outlined a year-long road map with four seasons lasting three months each. For Highguard, Wildlight knows a pace like that just won’t cut it for content-hungry players in 2026.

“Certainly the pace has accelerated,” Wildlight co-founder and CEO Dusty Welch said. “The expectation from players has seemed to migrate more towards the expectation of mobile players, which is far more frequent.”

Wildlight won’t be adding content at the hyper-rapid pace mobile game developers sometimes do (“Thank God,” Welch said), but it will build out Highguard’s roster of content more frequently than Respawn did with Apex Legends. “Every three months or every six months doing seasons is not in line with players' expectations now,” Welch said. Instead, Highguard will have two-month long Episodes. Those episodes, as detailed in a roadmap released at launch, will include new weapons, mods, bases, and amulets. Three will include new maps. Two will add new mounts. And there's a "surprise" planned for December.

The studio is focused on the long-term with Highguard, with Welch teasing that the team is playtesting multiple Wardens it can’t announce yet. According to product and publishing VP and game writer Jason Torfin, Wildlight “literally build[s] pivots into the way we design” to both keep up with player demand and to ensure that initial development goes smoothly.

Wildlight knows what a year out for Highguard looks like straight away — something the folks who worked on Apex Legends couldn’t say seven years ago.

“We ruthlessly scope,” Torfin said. “Four years ago, one thing we did say is, 'We're going to ship in January of 2026,' and we're shipping in January of 2026.”