Sea of Space Thieves
I’ve been very vocal about how much the homogenization of the game industry is a very bad thing. Yet, most unique games that are released get ignored and flop. I got into the playtest for Wild Gate, and I came away impressed, but with a pit in my stomach. I’m worried that yet another cool game will die because folks are too stuck in their own habits to give it the attention it deserves.
Wild Gate is a multiplayer PvP shooter that isn’t Call of Duty or Fortnite, which means it has a very uphill climb ahead of it. However, it’s also the type of game I love to see because it’s unique.
Wild Gate pits 5 spaceship crews, each with 4 players in a match to either destroy each other or find and escape with the artifact. You fly around and fight through small PVE dungeons to grab loot and gadgets for your ship as you search for the artifact and gain the strength required to take on other ships.
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Wild Gate does have elements of Battle Royals and Extraction Shooters, but the way it handles the concept is pretty unique. The game most similar to it would be Sea of Thieves if Sea of Thieves had been more honest about the type of game it was.
You see, Sea of Thieves for most of its lifespan was a PVP game. The PvE portions existed purely as a machine to fuel the PVP. Treasure existed to be looted and fought over. The game often pretended that this wasn’t the case, but it really was. The thing is, Sea of Thieves was very open, you might not encounter another crew for hours on the open sea.
Wild Gate distills that idea down into a more digestible format. Wild Gate is not an open-world adventure, it’s a match-based game where each match can take between 15 minutes to an hour, and the entire point is to beat the other players.
Instead of sailing ships on the ocean, you fly spaceships. It has artistic similarities with hero shooters, but the characters in it are a lot closer to classes in the older Battlefield games.
Your Ship is the Main Character
You aren’t locked to your spaceship, you are free to jump out, explore dungeons, mine asteroids, and board enemy ships. Controlling the ship takes teamwork as there are several functions between actually flying the thing, using probes to search for dungeons and enemies, manning the guns, and keeping everything repaired.
There are a few things that really stand out to me that make me believe that Wild Gate has that special sauce to be an amazing experience. Firstly, while your character’s class can be customized with unlockable guns and gadgets, the vast majority of the loot you find while actually playing is either for your ship or a utility item.
Your ship is the main character in Wild Gate. You are looking for new guns and modules to upgrade the ship, not yourself. There are a couple of one-use handheld weapons you can find, but the majority of loot outside of ship upgrades are utility items. These things help you turn situations around in unique ways.
For example, I love Clamp Jets. You pick one up and slap it on a ship, and it will propel that ship in the opposite direction. The thing is, you can slap this on your own ship for a speed boost, but you can also grapple over to an enemy ship for some fun. In one match, my team was horribly outgunned, however, I managed to make it over to them, slap down a Clamp Jet, and use it to smash them into an asteroid, turning the tide of the fight.
The combat system is also very punchy and fun. Ships’ shields are made up of hexagonal quadrants that can be broken individually, allowing you to try and aim through those gaps to damage the hull. At the same time, the pilot can try and maneuver those open spots away from the line of fire while they recharge.
As the ship becomes damaged, fires spread, and parts break, windows shatter and doors explode sucking oxygen out of the ship until it’s repaired.
You can also board the enemy ships, but the respawn timer is very quick when you die, so it’s more of a strategic choice than an obvious go-to. If you board a ship and kill an enemy, they come back in 10 seconds. If you die, you come back in 10 seconds but also lose the time you spent boarding them, and if you want to do it again, you have to spend even more precious time doing so. That’s time you could have spent manning the ship’s systems during the battle.
This makes boarding a more strategic endeavor. It’s something you can do to get an edge by overloading the ship’s core, stealing gear, or spinning the wheel of the helm. However, you will be punished for overdoing it or spending too much time boarding. I remember at one point, 3 players attempted to board our ship, and sure, they interrupted us for a second. But then they died and we blasted the crap out of their ship since it had just one person left who I had to imagine was running around screaming in panic as they couldn’t fly, gun and repair all by themselves.
I really like the emphasis on the ships being the glue that holds you together, while having the option to use your twitch shooting skills to your advantage, either in offensive boarding or by repelling boarders. The quick respawn makes it bearable, a single wipe won’t usually spell doom for your ship, and that’s good.
Strategic Teamwork
There is so much room to outplay another team through strategy and teamwork rather than brute force, and I think that’s brilliant. But I also won’t sugarcoat what the game expects from you.
Whether you play with randoms or friends, you have to work together. The playtest had the option to disable voice comms, and that is a mistake. Wild Gate isn’t a game that you just play together in the same virtual space. You need each other to win, and that means figuring out what the hell everyone is doing.
I’m worried a lot of folks just won’t vibe with that fact, and I get it. I’m introverted, on the spectrum, and I struggle talking to people I don’t know. I can only make videos just fine because none of you can directly talk back to me. But games like Wild Gate are truly worth getting out of that bubble because they offer experiences you just can’t have without them.
Furthermore, Wild Gate is slower-paced than the trailer lets on, and I think that’s a good thing too. The constant need to be blasted in the face with dopamine at all times is not a healthy way to engage with video games, and I say this as someone diagnosed with an attention disorder. There are plenty of games like that already, and I like that Wild Gate is different.
Labor of Love
The other thing is, I got the sense that Wild Gate is a labor of love; it exists because it’s the type of game that the developers wanted to make, and I think the playtest is evidence of that. It wasn’t some demo disguised as a beta or an early access period. It was a playtest, there are balance issues, and they are gathering feedback on them. The game doesn’t even have a release date yet, and there is another playtest planned.
Wild Gate reminds me of a bygone age of video games that you played because they were just fun, and for that fun. Exoprimal gave me the same feeling, and it ultimately died because not enough people gave it the chance it deserved either. I don’t want to see Wild Gate suffer that fate.
However, I’m not here to sell it to you; after all, I only played the playtest, and this isn’t a review. I just want to encourage you to keep an open mind, not just with Wild Gate but with games in general. Especially the ones in the AA and AAA space that are actually taking the risk to be different. The industry is very risk-averse right now, and every time an innovative idea fails, it gets even more risk-averse.
I’m just saying, keep an eye on Wild Gate, and be open to new experiences. I’m not saying you should feel bad about not spending money on a game you might not like, but I do think a lot of folks, myself included, are too quick to decide they automatically don’t like something without playing it. Especially since internet echo chambers are all the rage.
I’m just in constant fear of console and PC gaming delving deeper into the homogeneous territory where all we get are safe sequels, clones of tried and true formulas, and addictive skinner boxes cosplaying as a dopamine button. Wild Gate is an example of a game bucking those ideas.
Maybe Wild Gate will release, be complete crap and I’ll have egg on my face. But at least let it have that fighting chance, rather than shrugging it off already, simply because it’s a PVP game that isn’t following that tried and true formula.
