If you’re one of the millions of players who have sampled Sea of Thieves since its launch way back in 2018, and found yourself thinking “this is fun, but what if it was in space?”, some former Blizzard devs have got some great news for you.
Wildgate looks like the kind of multiplayer, ship-vs-ship, loot-hunting action that’s made Sea of Thieves such a roaring success for the last eight years, except set in a frontier region of space called The Reach.
In this upcoming space game, you play the role of a Prospector who has come to The Reach in search of your fortune and chasing tales of a legendary Artifact, only to find yourself plunged into a world of piratical chaos and endless skirmishing. To survive and thrive, you need to either escape The Reach through the eponymous Wildgate with the Artifact in tow, or murder every other Prospector crew to achieve Dominion.
The emphasis is heavily on multiplayer, allowing you to join a crew of up to four Prospectors to scavenge loot and upgrade your ship. Mid-match progression looks abundant, with upgradeable ship guns, turrets, personal weapons, traps, and a plethora of other goodies to discover and wield to terrifying effect.
One of my favorite moments in the trailer features a Big Red Button, attached to the side of what looks like some kind of massive bomb, which, when pressed, starts a countdown to a ship-annihilating explosion.
Like Sea of Thieves, it looks like there’s a focus on mid-combat ship management, including things like putting out fires from other players’ attacks before they spread and fatally compromise your vessel. You can also choose to take the battle to other crews directly by boarding their ship and wreaking havoc. Being able to breach another crew’s ship opens up a world of potential diabolical use cases for the game’s various traps.
Other players aren’t the only hazards in The Reach. The entire region is an anomaly, and it looks rife with all kinds of environmental hazards to navigate through or around during running battles with other ships. There are globules of what looks like roiling space lava, as well as cosmic storms that could make venturing outside of your ship a deadly proposition. That said, the danger is balanced with rewards; the trailer shows a sequence where a Prospector drops onto some kind of icy asteroid and mines it for resources with a laser tool, with the devs promising that The Reach is filled with “treasure beyond your wildest dreams.”
Wildgate is the debut game from Moonshot Studios, the brainchild of former Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime, backed by a dev team with experience on Blizzard titles like Hearthstone and Starcraft 2. The game’s official website promises a variety of Prospectors to play as, with assets showing what looks like a brutal four-armed brawler and an insectoid-looking alien that can turn invisible. It also hints at Prospectors with skills best suited to piloting and other specific ship-based roles.
It’s a great time for Sea of Thieves-likes in space, with Jump Ship also set to launch sometime this summer. You can currently sign up to playtest Wildgate over at playwildgate.com, with the site promising that the game will land later this year on Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and Steam.
