Wildgate was just revealed to the world, and in the lead up to the reveal they invited a few people to come watch a presentation about the game, and then get hands on with it for a few hours.
If you missed the reveal. Wildgate is an upcoming Multiplayer Shooter that sees five teams of four players, take control of a ship, fly around completing PvE activities to gear up, and then trying to grab an artefact, and head through the Wildgate to escape once it’s activated. You win by either being the ship to escape with the artefact, or by destroying the other 4 ships in your game.
I’m wording it like this to highlight just how much is going on around the fighting. It is a PvP centred game, you’re going to be getting in to ship battles and gun battles, you can be attacked at basically any time, you’ll need to fight and defend against players, and ship battles are going to happen. BUT, there’s more going on here than just clicking heads and I wanted to highlight that. Ships need a good pilot. They’re going to need maintaining during a fight, and those PvE activities are going to need clearing out and then loot bringing back.
There’s a lot of important aspects going on here outside of click click boom. So if you think you’re a bit weaker at the PvP side of things, don’t worry. There’s still stuff for you to enjoy here, as long as you know that fights will happen eventually.
There’s comparisons you can make to Sea of Thieves… Group of friends, some filled with more murderous intent than others, fly around, get big guns and then go and use them to take other peoples big guns. It’s a fair contrast to make. While playing with the devs, the one I mentioned was Guns of Icarus if you can find it simply due to the size and scope of the ships you’re playing with. These spaceships are not small, they handle like a giant spaceship. They’re also wider than you think, which is why I had my flying privileges revoked in our team.
So instead I spent my time being a gremlin and harassing other ships, and loved every moment of it. One of the things that I was told early during the preview, was anything you can do on your ship, you can do to an enemy ship. I didn’t think much of it the first time I it outside of “neat”. As the preview went on, I kept remembering back to this statement, simply because the options for deviancy that you can get up to in this game are fantastic. Here’s a short list off the top of my head of things you could do. You could steal modules from the enemy ship for your ship. You could stick thrusters on the front of their ship to throw them in to reverse and stop them chasing you. You could use a tractor beam to pull them closer to get in range. You could take control of their ship and lower the shields during a fight. If you’re playing as a specific character, you could take their modules, and just recycle them… And so much more.
During the event, there was a game where we had the artefact, and were heading for the exit, but had several ships chewing us apart with gunfire… Our ship was on fire, our shields were cracking, and all hope seemed lost… So, we devised a stupid plan. Take the artefact, and drop it on to an enemy ship, get them blown up, and then steal it back. We took the artefact and threw it on to one of the other ships, which gave us breathing room and time to heal up, as everyone shifted focus on to the other ship. At which point we stole it back, and made our daring escape.
It was crazy, but it worked. That seems to be a solid thread throughout Wildgate. At every moment it felt like it was trying to create a playground, and give you all these weapons and modules, that you can use either on your ship, or on an enemy ship, and then it was up to your creativity as to how you utilize them.
I was lucky enough to spend the few hours I played just being able to ask the devs questions as we flew around talking nonsense. I always worry about PvP games these days, as there’s so much noise it can be hard keeping a sustainable player base. I’m hoping that Wildgate reaches the players that would love it though. As it feels like their approach is one with a great foundation behind it. They wrote short stories of lore, created over 100 pages of world building when it came to getting the feel right for things making sense. On the mechanics side, things had to feel fun and with a purpose. On the progression side they discussed wanted players to feel rewarded, and not have to worry about FOMO when they approached the design of Adventure Paths.
I always get exited about world building like they talked about, I can’t help it. I’d love to see some of those stories, or even more of their lore, and of course if this is successful then it means they have a library of information to pull from next time.
During my time playing it, I had memories of Guns of Icarus, Sea of Thieves, even Wildstar. The colourful art approach, the dedication to wanting to build out this world, and then fill it with ideas. I’m a fan of PvP and PvPvE style games, I think a solid mix of PvE and PvP allows for risk/reward style ideas, and creative approaches. Wildgate scratches an itch, even if I dislike games that rely on me having 3 friends on speed dial, I ended up wrapping up the preview event and then hanging around to help with the next group if they needed extra players, simply because I was having that much fun.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed for this one, it was a fun way to spend some time with friends. I always enjoy banter style games where you can hang out, shoot stuff and mess around. I was also told you can strap one of the booster rockets to another player, and shoot them off in to space. I never achieved this during the preview, but that sounds like my kind of stupid.
