The first thing I thought after watching the Wildgate trailer was that we already have Concord at home (or at least we used to). The second was that the sci-fi extraction shooter from ex-Blizzard developers might be able to succeed where Sony’s hero shooter did not thanks to a gameplay loop that looks way more like Sea of Thieves than Call of Duty.
Revealed by Dreamhaven studio Moonshot Games during a Game Awards livestream on Tuesday, Wildgate is a multiplayer FPS in which crews of players explore a region of space called the Reach in search of a MacGuffin called the Artifact. Once teams find it, they have to battle one another to extract. That can happen aboard spaceships or out in the void. But if a squad’s ship gets blown up, their journey will come to an abrupt end. It’s coming to PC and consoles sometime in 2025.
You can see where I’m getting the Sea of Thieves vibes from. The deep-dive trailer makes that even more apparent:
It’s an ambitious mashup of genres. Wildgate boasts “epic spaceship battles,” exploration through “cosmic storms,” plundering alien outposts for loot, and a unique cast of adventurers called Prospectors, each with their own arsenal of tools and abilities. The world and characters, which include a cat in a fish tank controlling a mech and a anthropomorphic goat warrior, are a bit all over the place, but I can see them growing on me if the gameplay loop is as fun as it sounds.
Whether Wildgate has the magic to put it over the top where so many other live-service multiplayer games have failed remains to be seen. Moonshot Games is helmed by some Blizzard vets who worked on Hearthstone, StarCraft, and other franchises, including producer Jason Chayes, designer Dustin Browder, and artist Ben Thompson. The team is part of Dreamhaven, the publishing label led by ex-Blizzard president Mike Morhaime.
“Wildgate rewards cooperation and tactical mastery in a way that realizes Dreamhaven’s goal to bring players together and help them create lasting memories,” Morhaime said in a press release. “Since every match of Wildgate plays differently, there’s tons for you and your friends to discover as you explore the Typhon Reach. Ship-vs-ship combat brings an element of chaos that makes for an especially fun time, and we’re looking forward to players experiencing it for themselves during the playtest.”
Today’s livestream also gave updates on Dreamhaven’s other partner projects. Secret Door’s tabletop-inspired RPG, Sunderfolk, will be $50 and is headed to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, and PC on April 23. FuzzyBot’s Lynked: Banner of the Spark, a loot-based action-RPG cozy sim (yes, really), is headed out of Early Access for PS5, Xbox, and PC on May 22. Finally, Game River’s Mechabellum, a tactical mech auto battler with shades of Total Annihilation that launched on PC last year, recently launched season 3 and is currently on sale.
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