My overall opinion of Highguard has been steadily improving since its rocky launch last month. As a long-time Apex Legends fan, Highguard’s default 3v3 raid mode was a little too slow-paced for me. But I instantly fell in love with the chaos of its “experimental” 5v5 mode, an addition that developer Wildlight Entertainment decided to make permanent after listening to player feedback.
But until late last week, something was still missing: lore. Who are these Wardens, and why are they fighting each other? On Thursday, Wildlight finally offered up some answers via a beautifully animated five-minute video uploaded to YouTube. Entitled “Wardens,” the animated short explains the origins of Highguard itself and offers a glimpse of the relationships between the game’s Wardens. Mainly focused on lightning-wielding Warden Atticus, the episode reveals that Highguard is a lost continent that has “magically reappeared” after being lost for centuries.
Atticus, Scarlet, and Redmane venture into the lost world in search of the Shieldbreaker, only to discover that they aren’t the only folks interested in pilfering Highguard’s spoils — Condor, Mara, and Slade are waiting for them inside the base, and Atticus’ crew are nearly defeated in the ensuing fight. Ultimately, they manage to take out the enemy team and escape. The episode ends with Atticus sneaking off to snatch a strange glowing medallion, “for the coming dark.”
A day later, on Feb. 6, Wildlight uploaded a second animated short, this one titled “Skydrift” after the game’s newest map. This episode sees Atticus team up with Condor and the game’s newest Warden, Ekon. The glowing medallion is something called a “demiarch relic,” a powerful Macguffin that could prove disastrous should it fall into the wrong hands. Against Ekon’s warnings, Atticus and Condor venture further into Highguard than anyone has before. On the way, they encounter Una (and some of her Groot-style nature-powered abilities), who knocks everyone on their asses before Redmane shows up and steals the relic, remarking to Atticus that it’s “just business.”
Thankfully, Ekon’s wolf-form beats the crap out of Una, Slade, and Redmane, allowing Atticus to get his hands back on the demiarch relic. He inserts the relic into some ruins deep within Highguard, causing the damaged structure to reform into Skydrift, a floating city. Atticus tells Ekon that he plans to “reawaken” Highguard, presumably using these demiarch relics (we learned in “Wardens” that he has access to a whole box of the things), but Ekon warns him that “some things are better left asleep.” We’re then shown that the energy burst from Skydrift’s reawakening seems to have also impacted an enormous, partially buried dragon skeleton, which immediately exhales some fire. Neat!
Obviously, there are still plenty of questions here, mainly with regard to relationships between the characters. In the first episode, we see Condor fighting against Atticus with Mara and Slade. In the second episode, she’s teamed up with Atticus and Ekon. Redmane appears to be a bit of a turncoat, supporting Atticus in the first episode and betraying him in the second. Slade seems to be loyal to whatever side of the argument Atticus isn’t on. Given the fact that all of these characters can squad up together in-game (and don’t have any dialogue suggesting they dislike each other), I’m a little bit confused about whose loyalties lie where, but I imagine Wildlight will eventually give us a better idea of what’s going on.
For now, I’m just happy to see that regular, animated lore drops seem to be a priority for the dev team. As someone who has played Apex Legends since day one and was spoiled rotten by the game’s animated lore drops, I’m happy to see that Highguard‘s developers are prioritizing the story.
I know a lot of players don’t care about the “why” of it all — as long as a game is fun, it needs no explanation. But personally, I like my live-service shooters to explain who I’m playing as, who I’m shooting at, and why I’m shooting at them. Apex Legends pulled this off perfectly with the reveal that the Apex Games are a bloodsport, and every match is real, with Legends respawning unharmed on the dropship after each game. Unfortunately, Respawn seems to have let lore videos fall by the wayside. EA insists an Apex Legends TV show is still on the table, but we haven’t seen an episode of Stories from the Outlands in years, and lead animator Moy Parra left the studio in early 2025.
Highguard still has some explaining to do, lore-wise, but based on “Wardens” and “Skydrift,” I’m thrilled that — at least for the time being — Highguard‘s story is one that its developers are interested in telling.