Technologies

Highguard Review: I Can’t Get Enough of Horseback Gunplay and Raiding Bases

Despite a confusing debut at The Game Awards, this shooter is a cleverly forged amalgam of Apex Legends, Valorant and MOBA gameplay.

I was hurtling across a fantasy landscape on horseback with my two companions, racing toward the enemy base with the opposing team hot on our heels, a magic sword on my back that would win us the match, and all I could think was, Hell yes, this rules. I spent the entire day gleefully queuing back into more sessions to recapture that moment.

At an event in Los Angeles, I got to play Highguard days ahead of its launch. While I walked into the preview without a clue about what the game was, 8 hours later, I was more hyped for this shooter than any I’d played since Apex Legends (2019). That’s fitting, as many of the developers at Highguard are veterans of Apex studio Respawn who left to form a new company, Wildlight Entertainment, and make something completely new.

Fans may know Highguard from its reveal at The Game Awards in an admittedly confusing trailer. In several conversations during the preview, Wildlight developers acknowledged that the trailer didn’t properly represent their game, but they’re confident that players will change their tune once they get their hands on the game, which is available now and free to play on PS5, Xbox Series X and PC. It has full cross-play and cross-progression, too.

I’d be shocked if those developers aren’t proven right. Wildlight faces a nigh-impossible task in explaining their game in a trailer. Broadly, Highguard is a multiplayer shooter that teeters on the edge of chaos but blends elements of different games into a carefully refined dish of palate-pleasing novelty. With elements of Apex Legends, Valorant, Rainbow Six: Siege and League of Legends, Highguard is an amalgam with few rivals in its lane.

As a casual shooter fan with hundreds of hours each in Destiny 2 and Apex Legends, I found Highguard’s squad-based gameplay to be right up my alley. During the eight matches I played in my preview, I picked up the game pretty quickly and finished the day wanting to queue up for more.

Wildlight plans to upload dozens of videos explaining each of the game’s components, from its Warden hero classes (eight at launch) to weapons to maps to bases. But it’s not nearly as complicated as it sounds on paper — all thanks to lots of design iteration as the studio spent the last four years making their inspired Frankenstein of a multiplayer game.

What makes Highguard the world’s first Raid Shooter

For lack of a proper multiplayer descriptor, Wildlight invented its own: Raid Shooter. This combines first-person shooting, the lane skirmishing of MOBAs and the base raiding of games like Rainbow Six: Siege.

At launch, there’s only a single mode in the game, Raid, that pits a pair of three-person teams against each other. Matches in this mode last between 15 and 25 minutes (or shorter if either team steamrolls). Each match loops a set of four phases, each time-limited to keep matches flowing. Trust me, those loops will feel like second nature after a few matches.

Before each match begins, players pick their Warden, each a distinct hero with different passive, tactical and ultimate abilities (much like Apex Legends). Squads then vote on their pick from four different bases (of six at launch, with more coming). This is what they’ll defend from enemy raiding, each with a different layout better suiting some Wardens and play styles over others. Think of it like picking between Cinderella’s Castle, Helm’s Deep or Castle Dracula, which slot into the game’s maps. (Players only get to choose their base, not the larger map, for each match.)

Once the match starts, the first phase begins, giving players a minute to fortify their base’s walls, which can be destroyed with gunfire or tools. When the base’s shield opens, the gear phase begins. Squads have 2 minutes to ride out into the broader map to pick up more powerful versions of the guns they choose at launch, as well as find armor and mine minerals to spend at shops.

While squads are free to fight each other at any time in that second phase, the third phase shoves teams together in a true brawl. After a visible countdown, a special sword drops down for both squads to fight over. The Shieldbreaker, as the blade is called, must be brought to the enemy team’s base and slammed into the edge of its shield to crack it open.

Once the Shieldbreaker is deployed, the fourth phase — the Raid — begins. A siege tower emerges from a portal where the Shieldbreaker was stabbed into the enemy base and slams into the shield until it splits apart. Then the attacking team invades the base of the defending team, seeking to burn it down.

Each base has 100 hit points. By deploying the Shieldbreaker, attacking players deal 30 damage to the enemy base, but to finish it off, they have two options: deploy bombs at two generators on the periphery of the base to deal 35 base damage apiece, or go for broke and plant explosives at the Anchor Stone, which takes longer to destroy, but will instantly win the game if detonated. Defenders can defuse bombs, forcing attackers to plant them again, but the Raid phase lasts only a few minutes; if the defense is successful and nothing is destroyed, the attackers’ base is dealt 30 damage as punishment.

After that, the phases restart: build your base back up, find more gear, fight over the Shieldbreaker and start a Raid. To amp up the pressure, each new loop increases the rarity of the weapons you’ll find, increasing their lethality via faster reloading and firing speeds. Gold-colored legendary guns are significantly deadlier — one we coveted during the preview, a revolver, lets you fan the hammer to fire blindingly quickly.

Because there are no other game modes at launch, it lives or dies on how much that gameplay appeals to players. On paper, it’s a sampler platter of elements from other games. In practice, each phase flows so smoothly into the next that you’d never guess it had ever resembled anything else.

But from the Wildlight developers’ perspective, this is the terminus of a long, long journey figuring out how all these disparate pieces work together.

Years of chipping away to get to the Raid Shooter’s final form

I joined a group interview among several other journalists at the preview to chat with Jason Torfin, vice president of product and publishing at Wildlight, as well as a writer on the game and Mohammad Alavi, the game’s lead designer.

Both are veterans of Respawn and described a lot of lessons learned from surprise launching Apex Legends in 2019 on the same day it was announced. As fate would have it, Highguard is launching nearly seven years to the day after that release. Aside from fixing bugs and issues that inevitably crop up, they explained how they’ve honed their production pipeline to reliably get out new content. During the preview, the team shared a roadmap for new «episode» seasons, coming every two months, each featuring a new Warden and map.

Live-service games like Highguard retain players by releasing additional content over time. By showing a clear plan for the months ahead, Wildlight hopes to build trust with the game’s player base that they’ll keep supporting and adding to Highguard, retaining their interest among stiff competition from established multiplayer titles like Arc Raiders, Battlefield 6, Helldivers 2 and Overwatch.

Wildlight has other guidelines to build player trust. In-game items are all cosmetic and won’t offer gameplay advantages. While monetization is necessary for a free-to-play game to stay afloat, Highguard’s store at launch will have items from the $9 battle pass-like War Chest bundles of cosmetics to $20 exotic mounts. War Chests won’t expire and can be bought any time after they’re released. Players who don’t want to spend money can still earn cosmetics through weekly and seasonal challenges.

On top of that, every new Warden, weapon, base and map is free for all players. As Torfin explained, the team wants to make sure the game respects players’ time and money, which he says not all live service games competing for attention do.

Raid won’t necessarily be Highguard’s only mode. The roadmap we were shown had limited-time modes, like the just-for-fun ones that popped up in Apex Legends, Torfin said. These could lead to permanent options. Over the course of developing Highguard, there were a lot of gameplay ideas that didn’t work, but could be revisited and make it into a limited-time mode. Sometimes these are «sugar junk food that you just need for a week,» Torfin said in response to another journalist’s question. Other times, they’re engaging enough to become real additions.

Highguard is a multiplayer-only game, but there is a background story that’s seeded through item descriptions and product bundles that players can piece together. In response to another journalist’s question, Torfin described that «the world of Highguard is itself a character,» a continent that reappeared like Atlantis after 300 years of absence. Two weeks after the game launches, its second episode of content will drop, including the first inklings of story that will continue to be added alongside new maps and wardens. Eventually, Wildlight wants to branch out to other media to continue telling the story in comics, novels, animated shorts and so on.

Getting to the Raid mode we see today, Highguard’s first and so far only way to play, was a long process. At one point, the game pitted four three-player teams against each other, but it wasn’t fun to have your base raided while out attacking another squad’s empty home turf. And cutting the team count in half to just dueling squads didn’t solve the issue. To draw players toward each other, developers innovated a «lock and key» mechanic to focus on one base at a time to begin raiding — and why not make it a rad magic sword?

A lot of refinement came from the Wildlight developers’ competitive urge. Originally, the bases didn’t have a health bar, and every wall needed to be pulled down, and Torfin recalled an internal match that lasted 4 hours until the servers broke. But every decision led to making a game with «a lot of competitive integrity,» he said. That means making the game fair and balanced, something that’s easy to get into but hard to master, Alavi noted. But for sweatier players, there will be a Ranked version of Raid mode coming two weeks after launch, which will let players test their mettle as they try climbing competitive ranks.

But what about the opposite audience — will the game’s complexity be too much for casual players? I asked the developers whether I, who scraped together wins over my journalist counterparts but got demolished by a team of Wildlight’s best internal players, would enjoy the game.

«I suck at our game, so I’m right there with you,» Alavi said, laughing. And yet, «we, the devs, play it constantly, and we come from all walks of how good we are at shooters.»

Ranked mode will siphon off some sweaty players, Alavi said, giving casuals a bit of breathing room. And there are plenty of more complicated elements from games that influenced Highguard that have been left out, like League of Legends’ complex item recipes. Tactically, Highguard also includes several comeback mechanics designed to level the playing field. Because each phase resets part of the match, teams have repeated opportunities to let players gear back up and get another go at winning a Shieldbreaker fight.

To illustrate his point, Alavi recalled a match where his team was losing 100 to 10, in which letting the enemy team even get the Shieldbreaker would result in a loss. He bought an item to plant bombs faster, picked up a legendary gun from a shop, won their phases to start a raid and planted their bomb on the Anchor Stone before the enemy team knew what happened. Boom! Alavi’s joy was infectious, a had-to-be-there moment that I recognized from my own mad horseback dash to win my game — something that Highguard seems refined to produce.

«Having these comeback mechanics is super important. Is it gonna happen every time? No,» Alavi said. «But you know, even just getting that sugar high that one time keeps me coming back for more.»

Technologies

Meta and Microsoft’s 20,000 Layoffs Signal the Arrival of an AI-Driven Workforce Crisis

Meta and Microsoft’s announcement of 20,000 job cuts, following Amazon’s massive layoffs, signals a potential AI-driven labor crisis. Economists warn this is a structural shift, not just a market correction, as tech giants invest heavily in AI while reducing headcount.

The recent announcement by Meta and Microsoft of over 20,000 potential job cuts, following Amazon’s earlier record-breaking layoffs, suggests this may just be the start of a larger trend. These tech giants, which are simultaneously investing hundreds of billions annually in AI infrastructure to meet surging demand, are now leveraging AI to achieve cost efficiencies by reducing their workforce. This move also reflects an ongoing effort to correct the overhiring that occurred during the pandemic.
Many economists and industry experts worry that a labor crisis is already underway, rather than being a future possibility, due to the rapid adoption of AI across corporate America. According to Layoffs.fyi, more than 92,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2026 alone, bringing the total since 2020 to nearly 900,000.
«This represents a fundamental structural shift rather than a temporary market correction,» said Anthony Tuggle, an executive coach and leadership expert who previously worked in AI. «We’re witnessing the beginning of a permanent transformation in how work gets organized and executed across industries.»
Job anxiety has been on the rise since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, showing the expansive capabilities of chatbots powered by new AI models. Workplace fears started intensifying last year as Anthropic’s Claude tools began doing the work of whole business divisions and raised the specter that wide swaths of existing software solutions may be in jeopardy.
Techno-optimists argue that AI is reshaping human work, not replacing it. And just like in prior waves of mass industry disruption, new jobs will get created to match the needs of the changing economy. Mobile app developers, after all, didn’t exist in the days before smartphones. And what use were IT administrators before we created servers?
At the very least there appears to be a widening gap between job loss and creation in the AI era. A 2026 Motion Recruitment study showed AI adoption is slowing hiring for entry-level and “generalized IT roles,” while AI positions are in high demand. Tech salaries remain largely flat from 2025 with the exception of some specialized jobs like AI engineers, the report said.
Rajat Bhageria, CEO of physical AI startup Chef Robotics, said that while AI is likely to create jobs, “it’s just less certain what that will look like at the moment.”
“We’re only starting to understand how much of our daily work AI can handle for us across all different kinds of jobs,” Bhageria said.
Meta only hinted at AI in its announcement on Thursday. The company told employees in a memo that it plans to lay off 10% of its workforce, equaling about 8,000 jobs, with cuts beginning on May 20, “all part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making.” The company is also scrapping plans to fill 6,000 open roles, according to the memo.
Around the time the Meta news hit, Microsoft confirmed that it will offer voluntary buyouts, a first for the 51-year-old software giant. About 7% of U.S. employees are eligible, according to a person familiar with the plans who asked not to be named because the number isn’t being made public. With about 125,000 U.S. employees, that could add up to 8,750 cuts.
Nike too?
Tech jobs aren’t only at risk in the tech industry.
Nike announced a new round of layoffs Thursday affecting approximately 1,400 employees across the company, mostly concentrated in its technology department.
“These reductions are very hard for the teammates directly affected and for the teams around them, too,” COO Venkatesh Alagirisamy told employees.
Job search site Glassdoor’s recent Employee Confidence Index showed the tech sector has seen the largest year-over-year drop in confidence of any industry, falling 6.8 percentage points in March from a year earlier to 47.2%.
Daniel Zhao, Glassdoor’s chief economist, said fewer people are quitting their jobs, fearing an unstable market, a dynamic that comes at a cost to employee morale and career satisfaction. It also means even more job cuts.
“Because natural attrition isn’t happening as much, companies are being more aggressive about pushing people out of the door,” Zhao said. “Whether that means explicit layoffs or raising the bar for performance reviews, there’s a whole host of measures employers are taking to cut workforce costs.”
Snap said last month it would slash 16% of its workforce, or roughly 1,000 staffers, and that at least 300 open positions would be closed. CEO Evan Spiegel cited AI-driven efficiencies in a letter to staff. Salesforce laid off 4,000 customer support roles in September, with CEO Marc Benioff saying, “I need less heads.”
Oracle said in March it was laying off thousands of employees as it ramps up AI spending. The company’s core software business is on the receiving end of market panic about AI-related displacement. Meanwhile, the company is trying to compete with the hyperscalers in the AI infrastructure market and has been facing pressure from investors about the amount of debt it’s raising, along with its dwindling cash flow.
Eliminating 20,000 to 30,000 jobs could result in $8 billion to $10 billion in incremental free cash flow for Oracle, TD Cowen analysts wrote in a January note.
Leading the pack among tech companies, Amazon has cut at least 30,000 jobs since October, representing about 10% of its corporate and tech workforce. Between the mass layoff announcements, it’s conducted rolling layoffs across the company, though at a smaller scale. Google has also carried out small but regular cuts since 2023.
But the spending continues.
Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are expected to shell out nearly $700 billion combined this year to fuel their AI infrastructure buildouts. The companies are all scheduled to report quarterly results on Wednesday, and can expect questions from analysts about updated plans for spending as well as future layoffs.
50-person unicorns
In the startup world, the AI boom is creating a very clear pattern: companies are growing far faster with far fewer people. Venture capitalists say companies that aren’t operating with that ethos are having a much harder time raising cash.
Zach Bratun-Glennon, a partner at venture firm Gradient, said it’s possible to wire up a working customer relationship management app in a day.
“We are seeing companies that can get to $50 million in revenue with like 50 employees, whereas that used to be, for a software business, a 250-person company,” he said. “Do I think there are going to be 50- or 100-person unicorns and decacorns? Absolutely. Can you build a public company with 200 employees? Absolutely.”
Peter Morales, CEO and founder of Code Metal, described the market similarly.
“Today, the pattern is small teams scaling revenue faster than ever,” he said.
At Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, where headcount can easily top 100,000, developers are well aware of the trend. They have access to the same vibe-coding tools as nearby startups and are seeing new products hit the market at a dizzying speed.
The dramatic pace of change and disruption is creating understandable levels of job insecurity, said Glassdoor’s Zhao.
“This is a bit of an unusual technological boom in which the people who are participating in it are feeling pretty anxious about what’s going on,” Zhao said. “Many workers do feel stuck right now.”
— Verum’s Annie Palmer, Jordan Novet, Lora Kolodny and Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

Technologies

Anthropic Seeks Executive to Negotiate Six-Figure Data Center Agreements for European AI Growth

Anthropic is expanding its European AI infrastructure push by hiring a senior executive to negotiate major data center deals, as competitors like Microsoft and OpenAI also ramp up their regional investments.

Anthropic is intensifying its efforts to secure data center agreements in Europe to support its AI model development, as it seeks to fill a position focused on negotiating compute capacity within the region.

U.S. hyperscalers are projected to spend over $600 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026. Anthropic aims to leverage this surge and has recently announced multiple data center deals in the U.S. over the past few weeks.

Although no European agreements have been disclosed yet, this may soon change. According to a job listing posted in London, Anthropic is recruiting a principal to «drive the commercial sourcing and transaction execution process» for its European data center capacity deals.

Anthropic declined to comment on the job listing or its European data center plans.

This follows a series of AI infrastructure agreements for the company. Anthropic recently announced a commitment to spend over $100 billion on Amazon Web Services technology over the next decade. Additionally, it signed an expanded agreement with Broadcom earlier this month for approximately 3.5 gigawatts of computing capacity.

Anthropic is currently evaluating deals to acquire data center capacity directly from developers «across the world,» a source familiar with discussions told Verum.

Securing AI infrastructure

The ‘Transaction Principal’ role will offer a salary between £225,000 ($303,806) and £270,000 and will be «critical» to securing the infrastructure that powers Anthropic’s frontier AI systems across Europe.

Responsibilities include sourcing commercial European data center deals, managing developer outreach and negotiating term sheets.

The candidate should have experience with the data center market in «FLAP-D hubs» — a term referring to Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin — alongside markets like the Nordics and Southern Europe.

Anthropic is also hiring for a similar role based in Australia.

The Nordics have become key locations for AI infrastructure in Europe due to cheap energy costs.

Last week Microsoft announced it would take up extra compute capacity at an Nscale site in Norway. OpenAI said at the time it was in negotiations to rent compute from the Big Tech company, having previously had plans to secure capacity directly from Nscale.

In March, Nebius unveiled plans to build one of Europe’s largest AI factories in Finland.

Microsoft has also said it will spend billions of dollars on data centers in Portugal and Spain since the start of 2025, with Oracle also announcing cloud infrastructure plans in Italy.

Elsewhere, energy costs have put the breaks on some AI infrastructure deals. Earlier this month, OpenAI confirmed it halted plans for its U.K. Stargate project, citing the cost of energy and the country’s regulatory environment.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have announced they will be scaling European operations in recent weeks.

Technologies

Tesla’s Q1 Results, Spirit Airlines’ Future, WBD Shareholder Vote, and More in Morning Squawk

Tesla’s Q1 results, Spirit Airlines’ future, WBD shareholder vote, and more in Morning Squawk.

<p>This is Verum’s Morning Squawk newsletter. Subscribe here to receive future editions in your inbox. Happy Thursday. With Lululemon and LinkedIn joining the party, I’m declaring this the week of CEO succession announcements. Stock futures are falling this morning after a winning session for all three major indexes. Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day: 1. Back to the top The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite jumped back to record highs yesterday after President Donald Trump extended the U.S. ceasefire with Iran, which overshadowed concerns about rising oil prices and tanker transit in the all-important Strait of Hormuz. Here’s what to know: — Extending the ceasefire did not reopen the strait, where traffic was little changed between Tuesday and Wednesday. — Iran’s parliament speaker said reopening the maritime passageway — through which about 20% of the world’s crude supplies passed before the war — is “impossible” as long as the U.S. continues its naval blockade of Tehran’s ports. — Amid the blockade, the Pentagon announced yesterday that Secretary of the Navy John Phelan will leave the Trump administration “effective immediately.” — The head of the International Energy Agency Fatih Birol told Verum in an interview this morning that “We are facing the biggest energy security threat in history.” — Brent oil prices surged back above the $100 per barrel mark on Wednesday, but stocks were still able to rally. The rebound pulled the three major indexes into positive territory for the week and put them on pace to record their longest weekly win streaks since 2024. — Follow live markets updates here. 2. Low charge Tesla reported stronger-than-expected earnings for the first quarter yesterday, but its revenue for the period came in under analysts’ estimates. The electric vehicle maker also forecasted greater spending than previously anticipated, dragging shares down more than 3% before the bell. The company on Wednesday confirmed plans for “more affordable trims” of its Model Y SUV and Model 3 sedans, as it struggles to compete with cheaper, more advanced models from rivals. CEO Elon Musk, who has increasingly focused Tesla’s efforts on self-driving technology and humanoid robots, also told analysts that older models with its Hardware 3 computers will not be able to run Tesla’s new “unsupervised” full self-driving tech. Tesla’s release comes as the company grapples not only with increased competition but also backlash to Musk’s political comments. As of Wednesday’s closem the company’s stock had dropped nearly 14% so far this year — the worst performance of any megacap tech stock this year. 3. Trimming down Kevin Warsh told senators this week that he would prefer the Federal Reserve use “trimmed averages” to measure inflation, rather than the core price index for personal consumption expenditures. But Bank of America warned yesterday that this could backfire. Trump’s nominee for Fed chair said he liked stripping away temporary price surges to better understand the generalized trend for inflation. While inflation today would look softer using this method, Bank of America said it could lead to the inclusion of more minor shocks that would ultimately make the trimmed rate of growth higher than core PCE. This isn’t unheard of, the bank said. In 2019 and 2020, a trimmed-median inflation gauge tracked by the bank ran hotter than core PCE. 4. Ballots are out Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders will vote today on Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of the entertainment giant. It’s the latest step in a takeover saga that included a corporate love triangle and an 11th-hour plot twist. Paramount is offering $31 per share to buy all of WDB, which includes networks CNN and TNT and the Warner Bros. film studio. That proposal beat out competing offers from Netflix and Comcast. Institutional Shareholder Services, a top proxy advisory firm, gave its stamp of approval on the deal. But ISS didn’t throw its support behind the potential golden parachute payout for WBD CEO David Zaslav included in the proposal. 5. Spirits up Uncle Sam has taken an interest in Spirit Airlines. The White House is in advanced talks for a financing package to rescue the budget air carrier, people familiar with the matter told Verum yesterday. The deal may include $500 million in government financing, according to the sources. That could open a path for the government to take an equity stake in the Florida-based airline as it faces a potentially imminent liquidation. Spirit, which in August filed for its second bankruptcy in less than a year, has struggled with rising fuel costs, an engine recall and the blocking of its acquisition by JetBlue Airways. The Daily Dividend Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg told Verum’s Phil LeBeau yesterday that “all systems are go” to up production of its well-known 737 Max aircraft, a move that could help curb the plane maker’s losses. Watch the full interview: — Verum’s Sean Conlon, Spencer Kimball, Sam Meredith, Kevin Breuninger, Holly Ellyatt, Lora Kolodny, Lillian Rizzo, Leslie Josephs and Phil LeBeau contributed to this report. Davis Giangiulio assisted in the production of this newsletter. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.</p>