Wildgate, a brand new first-person multiplayer game set in deep space, has officially been announced by Dreamhaven and Moonshot Games.
Launching on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC sometime in 2025, Wildgate is a crew-based PvPvE game where you and a crew of four travel into The Reach with the sole mission of collecting the Artifact and leaving through the Wildgate.
Recently, I was invited to an invite-only playtest where I was able to try out the game and play alongside other members of the media as well as the game’s developers. To sum everything up before diving into specifics, Wildgate is a game with immense potential to be the PvPvE game of the year.
But what exactly about the game stands out to make it feel that way; and should there be concern regarding reception?
Wildgate Preview
Being the type of player I am, I skipped any playthrough of the tutorial and decided the best way to learn was to dive right into The Reach.
Before getting into my experience, a quick overview of the general gameplay.
The game features up to 20 players per match with five teams of four players each. You play as a specific Prospector who each has their own abilities and tools based on what you are looking for. There are also five types of ships to choose from, each specializing in something like speed and maneuverability to protection and more.
The games take anywhere from 20 to 40+ minutes depending on the crews and how everyone plays. You can either choose to find the artifact and escape or win by destroying all of the enemy ships who are hunting for the same thing.
Each match features procedurally placed elements. Many of the space rocks and places of interest (POIs) aren’t procedurally generated in terms of design, but where they are located in a specific match will be.
Now that you have the brief idea of each match, let’s look at when you actually start playing.
Quick Decisions Are Key
In Wildgate, the beginning of any match felt as important as any other moment. You have to decide as a group how you want to attack. Do you want to start exploring via probe ships to try and locate where the Artifact and Wildgate are? What about immediately going to a POI in order to find loot to improve your ship with better shielding, cannons, etc.? These decisions set the tone for, hopefully, how your match is going to play out.
While you are building up your ship, you will be collecting items such as quad-cannon upgrades, ammo for your launchers, and ice for your shields. There are even ways you can sabotage enemy ships or lure them into traps to help your cause.
The POIs are pretty self explanatory. Each one has a various task such as activating power switches in an old containment facility that drains your oxygen fast. Completing the tasks while killing the AI enemies out to stop you will unlock a loot room full of the aforementioned items and upgrades.
When you find the Artifact itself, you’ll have to fight both AI and human players in order to walk away with it. Or, if you’d rather, you can let another team do the bidding and just prepare your ship for an attack in order to claim the Artifact for yourself.
Ship battles can happen on multiple fronts. You can choose just to attack an opposing ship from a distance with cannons and lasers. Or, for the bold, you can get close and attempt to board the ship to take out other crews in close combat. Just know that respawning will continue until a ship is fully destroyed.
A Familiar Feel
As you are out in Wildgate exploring, fighting AI enemies to get loot, or even battling other ships, you get a nice familiar feeling with the game. Not in the sense of this being a game you’ve definitely played before, but more so being able to see where inspiration for the game came from.
The travelling, looting, and battling feels reminiscent to Sea of Thieves in the very best ways. Moonshot co-founder Dustin Browder even called Sea of Thieves along with Guns of Icarus as big inspirations. He also said that Overwatch, Fortnite, and Apex Legends were inspirations in different ways for how they wanted to shape the game.
To be perfectly honest, it truly feels like the developers took various aspects from each of those games and made it into what plays and looks like an excellent melting-pot experience.
There was one other game that Browder listed as an inspiration, though it might not feel obvious to most players.
“Deeply inspiring to us was Subnautica,” he said. “We Jason [Chayes] talks about awe and wonder and creating a believable and scary world full of spooky dangers, Subnautica is—I think—one of the best games in the world at that.”
Overall Impressions
One of the best aspects of Wildgate is just how off the rails things can go in a matter of seconds. One minute you’re looting and upgrading your ship preparing for battle and the next you have two enemy ships converging on you at once with the goal of taking you out before you’re fully prepared. How you and your crew react to that makes the experience so fun. The panic of figuring out what to do on the fly is something that’s hard to create in games, but Wildgate does it in a way that never feels too overwhelming.
In my few hours with the game over the course of a week, it grew on me after just the first couple play sessions. I truly believe there’s potential here for Wildgate to become the multiplayer game of the year.
There will be concerns of keeping the game feeling fresh for more than a few months and making sure players stay engaged after the newness wears off. To that, Moonshot says that there are plans to have new releases every three-to-four months in a seasonal structure. These releases, as of now, are planned to include some sort of combination of new prospectors, ships, upgrades, different versions of The Reach, and more.
That then leaves the big question I have that can’t be answered until a full release: Will the general gaming community be willing to jump into another premium online multiplayer shooter?
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