Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime's new company is putting Sea of Thieves-style shenanigans in space with a new crew-based shooter
After leaving the company in 2019, former Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime announced in 2020 that he'd founded Dreamhaven, a new game publisher seeking to "reimagine the studio model." In 2024, Secret Door—the first of Dreamhaven's two in-house studios staffed by Blizzard veterans—revealed Sunderfolk, a tabletop-inspired tactical RPG. Today, in a showcase presented by The Game Awards, we've gotten our first look at what Moon Shot, Dreamhaven's second studio, has been working on behind the scenes.
It's a space piracy extraction shooter called Wildgate, and it looks like a promising way to get spaced by an enemy crew of animal people privateers.
In a press release, Dreamhaven says Wildgate players "team up in small crews to venture into a hostile, unpredictable, and mysterious region of space in search of an ancient relic known as the Artifact. While in pursuit of the Artifact, players work together to pilot their spacecraft, plunder wreckage, and discover forgotten loot."
To win in Wildgate, your crew either needs to be the first to grab the Artifact and escape from the lawless Typhon Reach through the titular wildgate wormhole. Alternatively, you can opt for a more confrontational approach to victory, and take out every other gang of space pirates in the sector. Your choice.
Whether you're looking for a successful smash and grab or victory through applied violence, Wildgate looks like it provides plenty of tools to find your crew's preferred playstyle. You and your fellow space pirates can opt for ship archetypes with different defensive, offensive, and spaceflight specs, and each can be fortified with traps and upgraded with armament you can loot throughout the Reach during your matches.
Adding to the chaos are the characters—sorry, "prospectors"—themselves. Whether you choose the spritely little space hawk or the rabbit-man with a stately demeanor, you'll have a unique set of abilities to cause shipborne chaos for your rival freebooters.
Wildgate's making a pretty compelling pitch. The best moments in other crew-based games are when things devolve into near-panic on your ship as you and your friends struggle to handle fires, leaks, and incoming cannonballs. Adding the threat of being vented out into space to that mayhem feels like a good combination to me.
Alongside Wildgate, Dreamhaven also revealed an April 23 release date for Sunderfolk and a new publishing partnership with Mechabellum, the mech-based mech autobattler from developer Game River. We called it "fast, fun, and deeply strategic" back in our 2023 preview, and hopefully Dreamhaven's support will help keep it that way for a good long while.
Wildgate is set to launch sometime in 2025, but you can sign up for a preview playtest that'll run from April 10-14.