The Game Awards-closing hero shooter Highguard launches today, but there’s already a stumbling block in place.
Before you even get into the new game from some of the folks behind Titanfall and Apex Legends on PC, you’ll have to enable Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, and Easy Anti-Cheat to run it. Not a problem for modern Windows 11-based PCs, but we’ve already seen where Secure Boot can cause an issue with a new online game.
Security Stumbling Blocks Put players on Their (High)Guard
As seen with last year’s Battlefield 6, there are technical and moral obstacles to Secure Boot. Chief among them is that, as a kernel-level security measure, it allows anti-cheat software to have some pretty intimate access to your PC.
You should be so lucky to only have that issue if you’ve got an older machine or run it on Linux. The latter isn’t as easily recognised as Windows is, and the former doesn’t necessarily have the resources to run such security measures.
So it’s less than ideal for a game that has had a rocky road to launch. Sure, these measures are ultimately there to prevent cheaters souring the experience, and they tend to work pretty well, but when they make it difficult to get into said game, it’s more than a little redundant.
Let’s hope it’s not a big stumbling block for Wildlight Entertainment’s Highguard. It’s free-to-play, so that helps it out somewhat, but there’s a lot of competition out there, and a negative reception after its reveal at the end of The Game Awards in 2025.
The premise at least looks interesting. Horseback-riding, PvP shooting, and big raids make for an unusual combination. You play in crews of Wardens fighting each other for control of a mythical continent.
Highguard is out on PC later today. So make sure you’ve got all the necessary security updates installed if you plan to check it out.
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