FPS ship battler Wildgate has struggled to find players on Steam since launch, but its next update could give it a second chance

It’s been rough watching the muted response to Wildgate over the last few months. While people on the subreddit study the Steam player numbers and offer armchair designer-style solutions, the actual developers have continued to work on improving the most abrasive parts of the game.

None of those updates, nor any price discounts, have been able to spark interest in players who either stopped playing or missed it entirely on the busy store pages of Steam. The Steam concurrents have dropped into the double digits and haven’t had a noticeable uptick in several weeks.

Over the last few months, however, Moonshot Games has been preparing a major update that could give it a second chance. On November 19, the Emergence update will finally give new players a mode that helps onboard them to the intricacies of joining a crew and flying a space ship. It will also include a mode that cuts out all the looting and focuses on large-scale ship battles. And a new alien prospector will join the roster with the ability to revive teammates.

In my Wildgate review, I wrote about what I think is its biggest weakness: It’s an incredibly clever concept to drop a bunch of space ships into a pocket of space and have them loot supplies until they inevitably clash, but it’s too complicated for its own good. It’s like an extraction shooter with the rock-paper-scissors contests of Overwatch that gives players zero direction on how to start forming strategies to work together and win.

I wasn’t alone in this criticism, and that’s why Moonshot went and fixed up the training mode against bots as one of its first major updates. In the Emergence update, the Treasure Hunt mode will be the next step in learning how the game works. You’ll still fight AI ships, but now you’ll have quests to gather loot and extract.

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(Image credit: Moonshot Games)

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(Image credit: Moonshot Games)

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(Image credit: Moonshot Games)

Once you’re comfortable with that, you can move onto the new Fleet Battle mode where teams of up to three ships (12 players each) drop in with no strong incentives to fight each other. This is where you can learn how to work with your crew on finding derelict stations to loot and identifying the best way to escape with your ship intact. My favorite matches of Wildgate came down to how good our pilot was at maneuvering around the map and this mode seems designed to teach you those fundamentals with a low-pressure environment.

The best part is that both of the new modes hook into the game’s permanent battle pass progression, so you don’t ever have to stop playing them if the main extraction mode doesn’t appeal to you. I get the sense that Moonshot realizes not everyone wants to play with such high stakes to experience how slick the game is as just a FPS ship battler.

Right now, it’s ridiculously hard to convince people to buy games over jumping into something free-to-play. And even when they’ll spend some cash, there’s competition like Peak that costs less than $10. Wildgate’s $30 price is a tough sell for such a unique game that doesn’t really click until you play it. In order to try to lower the barrier for new players, Moonshot is going to let anyone play the game for free for the first few days of the Emergence update, from November 20 to 24.

I can’t tell you if any of this is enough to bring people back to Wildgate, but I can tell you it’s a really promising start. It’s so common to see games flounder and die off that I was worried publisher Dreamhaven wouldn’t give the developers the resources and time to polish the game. But here we are with a moonshot that will at the very least fix the most egregious issues for the people who have stuck around.

Wildgate’s Emergence update drops on November 19.

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(Image credit: Moonshot Games)

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(Image credit: Moonshot Games)

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