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We’ve had a sneak peek at Wildgate – the new co-op shooter from Blizzard veterans, in which you fight space battles, board enemy ships and plunge into the chaos in the middle of space.
Four years after Blizzard legend Mike Morhaime left the company, his new venture Dreamhaven is finally showing what they’ve been working on all this time: Wildgate is a co-op shooter in which you play as a space pirate crew on the prowl, boarding enemy ships.
Moonshot Games’ debut game is a wild mix of Sea of Thieves and Hunt: Showdown, only with a lot more space junk. We’ve already had a chance to play it – and worked up a sweat faster than we would have liked.
What is Wildgate?
Wildgate is the brainchild of Moonshot Games, a studio founded by former Blizzard developers who have worked on games such as Hearthstone, StarCraft 2 and Heroes of the Storm. Together with publisher Dreamhaven, founded by Mike Morhaime, they have a clear vision: to create games that come to life through strong social dynamics and emergent gameplay – and that’s exactly what you notice about Wildgate from the very first second.
The game play can be best described as a co-op extraction shooter in space: In a team of four Prospectors – that’s the name of the playable characters – you board a small spaceship and explore the Typhon Reach, a dangerous, procedurally generated zone full of treasures, wrecks and rival crews. Your goal is to find the legendary artifact, secure it and make it to the extraction point alive. Alternatively, you can eliminate all other teams and thus force victory.
Each round is a race against other players: You dock at abandoned space stations, fight against hostile NPCs, loot upgrades and use them to upgrade your ship to gain the upper hand in combat against other crews. You never stay cooped up in the ship – many of the activities take place on foot, because you can always leave the ship using a jetpack and grappling hook.
How the gameplay loop works is also explained to you by the developers in the Deep Dive:
What sounds like a clear target structure on paper turns out to be a wonderfully unpredictable mix of tactics and improvisation in the game. Because as soon as another team has also found the artifact or ventures near you, things get uncomfortable. And then it’s often a matter of quickly coming up with a plan B.
This is what a round of Wildgate is really like
Our first round of Wildgate starts surprisingly quietly – but it’s not boring at all Before you can even think about firefights or raids, you first have to secure resources. Because without ice and fuel, you won’t get far in Typhon Reach. We leave our ship with the jetpack, float through a debris field in space and finally come across shimmering chunks that we have to mine with a special tool. Two resources can be mined from this: we need ice later to repair our ship, while fuel powers the boost – which can be a lifesaver in battles or when escaping from dangerous situations.
Back on the ship, it’s on to the next destination: one of the many so-called points of interest. These places – sometimes an abandoned space station, sometimes a claustrophobic cave in an asteroid – are something like mini-dungeons in the middle of space. The map is procedurally generated, so each game throws you into a new environment with a different distribution of loot spots and dangers. This ensures constant disorientation in the best sense of the word: you never know exactly what lurks behind the next field of debris – or who. Fortunately, you can control small reconnaissance drones
In our case, hostile NPCs lurk in the station. They’re not particularly clever, but as a group they’re quite dangerous. After the battle, we open a heavily secured loot chamber and are rewarded with ship upgrades and other useful tools – such as better turrets, alarm systems or other modules that can make all the difference. Everything is integrated directly into your own ship, preferably where potential intruders can’t just take it with them.
Until then, our mission seems almost too easy. But Wildgate wouldn’t be an extraction shooter if it stayed that way. As soon as we leave the station, we notice another ship – the first real enemy contact.
A fight breaks out. While two team members take on the on-board cannons and engage in a fierce space battle with the enemy ship, two of us go over to the counterattack: we board the enemy ship using a jetpack, fight our way through the crew and, at the push of a button, we overheat the reactor. Destroying the ship almost did the trick. But at the last moment, the survivors escape and disappear into the debris field.
We use the downtime to repair our own ship and collect more resources. But then a system warning sounds: another crew has found the artifact – the object that everything revolves around – and is on its way to the gate, the Wildgate of the title. If they reach it, the game ends and we have lost.
So we start the chase. We locate the target ship, attack – and then it happens: the ship that we almost destroyed before reappears. Instead of joining forces with us to save the game, they apparently decide to take revenge on us. The tactically smarter move would have been to take out the artifact team together. But they choose to take the high road – and thus enable the enemy to win.
As frustrating as it sounds, it’s precisely these unpredictable twists driven by real players that make Wildgate so appealing. It’s not always fair, not always calculable – but all the more exciting for it.
What we like – and what doesn’t quite work yetAfter just a few rounds, it becomes clear: Wildgate is not your typical co-op shooter. It thrives not on perfectly rehearsed sequences, but on the moments in between – when a plan goes awry, someone improvises spontaneously, or the whole team suddenly has to rethink. These emergent situations, as the developers call them, are the game’s greatest strength. Each game tells its own story, and rarely does anything go as planned – in the best sense of the word.
No one is forced to take on a specific task, but a certain division of labor automatically arises. Sometimes you fly the ship, sometimes you defend against intruders, sometimes you float through space with your weapon drawn on your way to the enemy lock. The fact that all of this transitions seamlessly into one another ensures a pleasant flow.
The scenario is particularly strong. The combination of a procedurally generated map, self-defined play styles, PvE mob fights and the constant risk of PvP makes every round exciting. The environment not only looks good, but also invites you to explore and try things out – including optional goals such as resource gathering or tracking down rare loot rooms.
However, there are also points where Wildgate still needs to be sharpened. This is most noticeable in the case of the prospectors’ weapons. The firearms currently seem a bit weak – there is a lack of hit feedback, which is extremely important in a shooter. Although the development team assures us that weapons that can be unlocked later will have more punch, ideally the basic arsenal should be convincing. After all, it is often the case that the gunplay in the early hours of the game determines whether the spark ignites.
It is also difficult to assess the balance between the different play styles at this point in time – for example, pure looting vs. aggressive fighting. Some teams act cleverly and defensively, while others rush into every fight. Whether all tactics are equally good in the long term cannot be judged after just under three hours of gameplay.
Soon you can blast off into space yourselves
You don’t have to wait too long to get a taste of Wildgate yourselves. The first community preview will take place from April 10 to 14, 2025 Those who want to play can sign up on the official website playwildgate.com
The full release is planned for 2025 on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. According to the developers, Wildgate is not intended to be a Free2Play title, but an exact price has not yet been set. All important gameplay content such as new weapons, equipment and Prospectors can be unlocked in the game by earning experience.
