Highguard didn’t actually invent a new genre of shooter

Highguard was released this week and has received a mixed response. Some players have praised the new title as innovative and fresh. Most seem to be finding the game mid at best — the game held the dubious honor of a “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam upon its launch (now “Mixed”).

What is a raid shooter?Battlefield 2142 was the first raid shooter“But they are different though,” I hear you say

According to its advocates, Highguard needs more time to reach its full potential because it is a “new genre”— the first-ever “raid shooter.”  Let the devs cook a bit. There’s a lot to navigate with a new genre. But… Is it a new genre? I think not. There is a game that did the core elements of Highguard all the way back in 2006. 

While the term “raid shooter” may be new, I contend that the first raid shooter was Battlefield 2142.

What is a raid shooter?

What actually makes a game a “raid shooter?” 

Typically, the type of shooter something is is determined by its core gameplay loop. A game is a battle royale because its gameplay loop involves many players entering a single lobby and only one emerging victorious. An arena shooter takes place inside a small, carefully designed arena typically emphasizing speed and movement. A hero shooter is one where the core mechanic is about the interaction between hero-specific abilities. 

Since the developers of Highguard have coined the term “raid shooter,” let’s look at Highguard to see its core gameplay loop to understand what makes something a Raid Shooter.

While Highguard has attempted to mash a lot of mechanics together and call that conglomeration a “new genre,” not all of those mechanics are key to its core gameplay loop. 

In Highguard, the core gameplay loop is about fighting for the Shieldbreaker and then attacking or defending bases. You fortify your base, then fight for control of a neutral objective called the Shieldbreaker that takes down the enemy shield, and then finally either defend or attack an opponent’s base. In order to deal damage to the enemy base, you must plant and detonate bombs on generators to deal base damage or attack the central nexus for an immediate win.

Distilled to a formula, the necessary and sufficient aspects that make up Highguard’s “raid shooter” mode are: 

Multiple teams defending a single base and attacking an opposing one  A preliminary stage wherein teams compete over neutral objectives to gain access to their opponents’ base A win condition phase, where the team that won the preliminary stage attacks and attempts to blow up the enemy base

While the game does feature mounts, looting, fortification, and heroes (Wardens), those are not core to this gameplay experience (in fact, looting and fortification are mostly just an annoying sidequest). If Highguard removed mounts, fortification, looting, and/or hero mechanics tomorrow, its form factor would be largely untouched, and it would still be a “raid shooter” since it would still be about raiding the enemy team base in order to deal damage to its structure, and stopping enemy raids on your own base.

Based on the criteria above, Battlefield 2142’s Titan mode was the first massively multiplayer raid shooter, and Highguard is a modernized version of Battlefield 2142’s most innovative mode.

Battlefield 2142 was the first raid shooter

In 2006, Battlefield 2142 was released, bringing with it a brand new core mode — Titan. 

In this mode, each team had a large, shielded base called a Titan, a large airship that floated across the map. In the first phase of the game, players would fight over missile silos on the ground. If you control the node, it fires missiles at the enemy base. If they control the node, silos fire on your base.

Once a team has secured enough damage against the enemy base shield, players could use special vehicles called APCs to launch into the air onto their opponent’s base, or use aircraft to land on it. Once inside the enemy base, players had to storm four different hallways with consoles at the end, which must be destroyed. Destroying all the nodes would open up the Core’s central room, allowing for explosive damage to be dealt directly to the Core.

This mode meets all the criteria for a raid shooter shared above: 

Two teams are fighting to defend their own base while doing damage to an enemy’s base There is a preliminary neutral stage where teams fight for the ability to attack the opposing base The win condition is entering an enemy’s base and blowing up objectives to deal enough damage to win the game

That’s a raid shooter. Highguard didn’t invent a new genre; DICE beat them to it 20 years ago.

“But they are different though,” I hear you say Image credit: Wildlight Entertainment

I’m not arguing that the games aren’t different. Highguard has brought new ideas to the genre that adjust the pacing and mechanics to work for a 3v3 format. A round-based format makes sense on a smaller scale, focusing the battle on one player’s base at a time. It feels a lot like a shrunk-down version of Titan, which features 64 players. 

When you have 64 players on a server, there is a greater possibility for a variety of player experiences to all be happening at once. You can have some of your team raiding the enemy Titan, some defending your own Titan, and some fighting over silos on the ground all at once, since you have 10x the players.

Crucially, I don’t believe that this changes the nature of the Titan — it’s still a game mode about raiding and destroying your enemy team’s bases across a neutral phase, followed by attack and defense phases. 

And when you keep looking at ostensible differences, you’ll find a lot of equivalency in the mechanics of these two games. Where Battlefield 2142 had tanks, choppers, and other vehicles, Highguard has mounts. Where Battlefield 2142 had four different classes with unique abilities, Highguard has a variety of Wardens with unique abilities. Where Battlefield 2142 has neutral missile silos to control, Highguard has a neutral Shieldbreak you have to control and escort.

The only fundamental difference left is Highguard’s looting and gathering system. To me, it feels like this was added to appeal to players of survival and battle royale games, but they feel pretty tacked on. You could easily have another system where players earn cash by completing objectives, or a system where everyone gets a set amount of currency to spend on a variety of different upgrades, or you could just forgo differences in power levels altogether and let raw aim and teamwork do the talking. 

My point is, the economic system can be crucial to a game’s genre, but I don’t believe it’s crucial to whether a game is a raid shooter. The games are no doubt distinct titles, and they do not share all their mechanics. In no way is Highguard an intentional or unintentional rip-off of Battlefield 2142. 

But there is no doubt in my mind that Battlefield 2142 did it first.

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