Wildgate Developers Talk Characters, Lore, Ships, And More

Developed by Moonshot Games and published by Dreamhaven, Wildgate is an upcoming PVP multiplayer shooter taking place in the Typhon Reach, the most mysterious and dangerous depths of space. Players will take on the role of various “Prospectors” and battle it out in ship-versus-ship/crew-versus-crew combat to claim valuable artifacts only found in the Reach. Wildgate sends players on a deep space adventure as they decide whether they will rush to claim the Artifact first or shoot out the enemy ships until their vehicle is the only one left standing.

Game Rant spoke to Moonshot Games studio head Jason Chayes and co-founder Dustin Browder about the story, characters, and world of Wildgate. They discussed the backstories of their favorite prospectors, how the team approaches designing each character, and why the game is not a hero shooter despite the popularity of the genre. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Wildgate Is A “Hero Builder,” Not A “Hero Shooter”

Q: I wanted to start with the characters because I love them so much. Can you speak about the process of designing them?

Browder: Well, we start with our lead character artist, Laurel, who does all of our characters. The challenge for her, obviously, is to come up with something that looks unique and has a lot of personality, and you can imagine how this character’s voice would sound even before they speak.

We start there, and then, once we get that character right, we start going into the design process of figuring out what their gameplay abilities are and all of that. We’ve always sort of wanted to make a game that had a lot of customization options for these characters, so we decided fairly early on that these characters were more like characters from Star Wars versus Overwatch. Luke could be using a lightsaber, he could pick up a blaster, or he could hold a thermal detonator, right?

We always imagined that the characters would have a collection of different passive abilities, or maybe some different special abilities, but you’d be able to choose the weapons to sort of customize the character however you want to play it. If you want to play the character with a heal gun, you can do that. If you want to play the character with a Mark II blaster, you can do that. You can sort of put together the character you want to create, with the equipment that you want.

Chayes: The only thing I’d add to that real quickly is, because Laurel’s in the role of our production designer, she does the individual visual development concepts and what our characters look like in our environments. Then, we’ve got a character team that supports her and all the stuff that she’ll come up with that are leading to the character production stuff.

Q: Is that why you didn’t go the hero shooter route? Given its popularity, I’m curious.

Browder: We really wanted to make something where you could sort of build the character the way you wanted to build the character. And when we started making this game five years ago, it was a very different market than it is today. I don’t know that we were really thinking about marketing, right? We were just like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if, instead of Sammo always having a sonic boom, you could give Sammo whatever weapon you wanted to give Sammo?”

We really wanted the characters not to feel too much like superheroes. We wanted them to feel more like characters from Firefly, Star Wars, or Star Trek, where these intrepid explorers are facing off against a difficult, dangerous, unknown part of the galaxy – the Typhon Reach. And we didn’t want it to feel like they had all the answers, you know? Spider-Man feels like he’s got a lot of answers. Spider-Man’s pretty much ready. He doesn’t even carry a gun. He’s ready to go, and that’s just the nature of that world-building. Captain America is ready for anything just with his shield, right?

We wanted these characters to feel like they’re not really ready. They’re not entirely perfectly equipped, they try different things, and they’re swapping weapons and trying different ones. Those weapons aren’t core to their identity in the way that Captain America’s shield is core to his identity. We weren’t thinking about the market. We didn’t know what the market wanted or needed. We just try to make cool stuff, and we hope it works out.

But we wanted the Reach to feel very powerful and very scary, and we wanted our prospectors to feel a little bit small, a little bit unprepared for it as they go into this dangerous place. We didn’t want them to feel and act like superheroes. That was sort of one of the ways in our minds—I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s what we were thinking—to get away from that superhero trope. Superheroes generally have one set of weapons they carry, and it’s their identity. It’s who they are. Explorers would have a bunch of different roles, and they would change them all the time depending on what their needs were.

That was the thinking. It wasn’t like looking into the future and saying, “hero shooters are going to be big or small or whatever down the road.” It was just, we want the Typhon Reach to feel awesome and scary, and we want these people to feel like explorers, not like superheroes.

Q: With all of that in mind, can you talk about how you designed the characters’ abilities? How important is party synergy, making sure that their abilities still play into their character and all of that?

Browder: I think that’s probably the number one goal: to make sure that the abilities feel like they match the look and personality of the character. In many cases, they were designed first. We came up with the art first, decided how they would sound, and cast them. Then, we worked on their abilities at the same time, but that’s probably the number one goal.

The other big goal is making sure that these characters speak to things that are important to you in Wildgate. Like, there’s no tank in Wildgate, right? There’s no one standing at the front pushing the payload. I know we have a payload in some of our locations, but it’s not core to the game in the same way that it would be in a game like Overwatch.

We wanted to speak to that. We have characters that are more about ship defense, and we have characters that are more about loot manipulation, or more about boarding, or more about repairing, and combinations of all of these. Some of them are combinations, but not all of them. A couple of combinations are possible. I think our biggest value here, for the characters and in terms of power level, is we really wanted to make sure that you feel the impact of the character as you play.

I know that if I’m playing Mophs or if I’m playing Sammo that there are opportunities in the game for me to shine as that character, but they’re not so powerful that your teammates, your crew members, want to manipulate which character you’re playing. That’s something that’s very common, right? In class-based games, MOBA, hero shooters, all of that, if I’m playing support, that means you need to play tank. I have an opinion, and I know which tank, like there’s a tank I need you to play. Or if I’m playing a specific DPS in a MOBA, then you need to play this or that. I have an opinion based on the meta. We really wanted the characters to have an impact, but not so much impact that I felt like I needed to put you in a headlock and tell you which character to play.

I don’t know that we’ve walked that line. We’re going to find out here, as we playtest more with the community. We have a team of about 50 developers who are very passionate, very excited about the game. We playtest a couple of times a week, but the game’s pretty new. There are a lot of different strategies in the game that are yet to be explored. As we play more and more in the community, we find out more and more how things are going, and we learn more about what we’ve made and how we want to modify it going forward.

Chayes: The other thing I’d add to that is it’s been a goal for us to have a lot of options in terms of the way you choose to play in Wildgate. We’ve used the term “hero builder” in some cases, rather than “hero shooter.” Which is to say, what you choose for your loadout makes a big difference in terms of how the games are going to go.

You can choose to do one character with the Mark II. You could choose to do Sal with the side pistol, and all these things change the way the whole thing goes. That was a big goal from the beginning, that you can kind of modify the way you go in and customize the way you’re playing. That’s another reason why we don’t really lock it, so there’s only one of each character per crew. You can have four different Sammos going in, if you prefer, and that’s a way you can kind of deal with the various things the Reach has to throw at you.

Wildgate Features A “Dreamscape Science Fiction” Aesthetic

Q: One thing I can’t help but notice is that there seems to be some artistic similarities between Wildgate and Dreamhaven’s other game, Sunderfolk. I was wondering if that was intentional? What drew you to the art style of Wildgate?

Chayes: You know, there was no direct connection there. One of the things about the way that we work here at Dreamhaven is, we really put a lot of independence in each of the various studios where they can chase whatever speaks to their passions. For us, the aesthetic of what the characters look like, what the Reach looks like, the ships, was all driven by the team and by what we thought would be the coolest game.

There are a lot of inspirations there. Everything from Saturday morning cartoons to more contemporary stuff that we’re all just very excited about for the aesthetic. But the biggest thing there was, really, we were just excited about a game in space that was brilliant and colorful and beautiful. There are a lot of awesome space games out there that have a more traditional sci-fi aesthetic, and there are a lot of IPs that we love that kind of focus on chrome, blue glows, and stuff like that. That stuff’s great, but we were just very excited about exploring this world where space was brilliant and colorful, almost like a dreamscape. That really kind of influenced the overall aesthetic of every part of Wildgate.

Q: So is that how you would describe the science fiction element of this game? As “dreamscape sci-fi?”

Chayes: We’ve talked about it as kind of a mixture of science fantasy, in a way. There’s sci-fi, for sure, but if you think about the overall look, the Reach itself, “dreamscape” definitely kind of covers it.

The Lore Of Wildgate Is Deep And Sometimes Well-Hidden

Q: Without any sort of real main campaign, it’s all just multiplayer matches. Can you talk a little bit about how players who are engaged in lore, who love all the little details that you all mentioned during the presentation, will be able to check it out and involve themselves in that lore?

Browder: We’re doing everything we can to sneak it in across the game. Obviously, like you say, there’s a lot of action. There’s a lot of stuff going on. You really have to move quickly, in some cases, to get things done. We’ve got our lobby screen, Lucky Docks, which is a place where the prospectors gather before they jump into the Reach to engage in the battles they play. It’s also a big part of the lore of the game that there’s this space station on the edge of space, beyond the reach of law, out beyond the edge of the Accord, where the prospectors gather. They live there, they eat there, they hear rumors about new artifacts there, and they do the whole thing.

We’ve got stuff hidden around that area that has a bunch of text on it and some images that teach you stuff. We’ve also got the chapters of our adventurers that are sort of a progression mechanic in the game, which will also have some text on them that will teach you some stuff. Obviously, the characters all have dialog in the game, and some pretty rare lines of dialogue teach you a little bit about the backstories of the characters or give you a sense of the relationships between some of the characters.

We’re going to get as much of it in there as we possibly can so that players can put it together, but you have to dig a little bit. We’re not going to be able to have a two-hour movie, right? We’re not going to serve it up to you quite like that. You’re going to dig a little bit, so I’m very hopeful that we can get enough of it in there that the community can dig in a little bit.

If you’re not the kind of player who wants to wait to hear the perfect line of dialogue, I’m sure somebody in the community will put it up on the internet. You can go and see it put all together, right? It’s something we’re certainly working on, an ongoing adventure where we can continue to weave the lore into the play experience.

Q: Speaking about the Docks, I love the names of the ships. There was this match I was playing, and one of the enemy ships was called the Still Relevant. When we were looking around at the enemy ships, we couldn’t find the Still Relevant, so we made a lot of jokes about that ship and how it was still relevant. I wanted to ask you how the ship names work? Are they randomly generated? What do they add to the match, in your experience?

Chayes: Those are not. They’ve all come up through different places on the team, through the history of the game. It could be something that somebody said at some point. It could be something that we just came up with over the course of development that we thought was funny and put in. We’re excited about them. They have a lot of personality, the ships.

So they’re not randomly generated. In the build you were playing, they’re randomly selected, although players will be able to sort of choose which ship types they want for their ships in the future. Another thing we’re pretty excited about is that we’re allowing, at this point, all of our localization teams to try and find similar kinds of cool names that resonate with their local audiences in the same way that Still Relevant did for you. We’re excited to see how that all plays out for players in Europe and Asia as well.

Q: What is your favorite piece of lore that you can share right now?

Browder: There are all kinds of stuff in there that we’ve worked on. We’ve written over 100 pages of lore for the game, and we’ve woven it across the game. I think one of my favorite ones is Ion’s backstory, the character who smashes windows and doors and breaks into ships and beats them up. Ion was a member of a group of soldiers called the Vanguard during the 100 Years’ War against the Firstborn, right?

This is the war that the Accord just got out of, just barely survived. What Ion used to do as a member of this elite military unit was drop behind enemy lines and cause as much damage and distraction as they possibly could. The Firstborn, being so arrogant, were unable and unwilling to allow any resistance. They would divert millions to defeat dozens. Once this weakness was discovered, the Accord started exploiting it, and they would send these soldiers behind enemy lines to try to distract as many troops as they could.

The Vanguard knew fully well this was a one-way trip. There was no confusion. They didn’t intentionally make it a suicide mission. They just knew it was going to be almost impossible for them to be rescued, and their job was to make as much noise as they could and draw as much fire as they could. They all knew the score. They were all very brave to take on this mission. Ion was one of the very few members of the Vanguard that survived the war, and he came out on the other side a little changed in the sense that everything in real life now is a little boring for Ion. He didn’t come out very damaged by it, but he came out like, “I need a little more adventure in my day than I can get going to space Starbucks.”

That’s why Ion came out to the Reach. It’s the most dangerous place in the galaxy. It’s the only place that still gives him that thrill of adventure, and it changes every day, right? I think one of the reasons I like Ion is that it obviously speaks a lot to the history that we’ve built into the IP. It shows how and why we all wrote this story because it grounds our characters in a space. It gives them a background. It gives them a place to exist, so they can react to it, and they can feel sort of real and alive. I think some of us can relate to that, right? Sometimes, life’s a little dull. And we’d like to have just a little more adventure in our day. Maybe not as much as Ion gets, but a little more adventure, so that one kind of speaks to me.

Chayes: On the topic of why everybody is risking their lives to go into the Reach, which, as you’ve seen, is one of the most dangerous places imaginable, there are a lot of different reasons there. Dustin spoke to Ion, and then you have Sammo, who’s going there to try and find an artifact to save his world.

One I always thought was really great is why Mophs is going. Mophs has also had this great experience of going through the process, working his way into the Reach. He was a veteran of the war against the Firstborn, the same as Ion, but he’s trying to find this artifact to basically finance his lifestyle. Here’s a guy who just likes the finer things that the Accord has to offer. He has some kind of very ritzy penthouse somewhere, likes good food, likes to really enjoy himself. Turns out, that’s expensive. So for him, he’s going to try and find these artifacts just because that’s really part of how he wants to present himself out there. Like a sort of very suave Lando Calrissian-type character is how we thought about him.

Q: One of the sort of mottos of the game is “Outrun or outgun.” But, based on the matches I played, it always leaned towards “outgun.” It was always a “last ship standing” sort of result. Is that just something with the way that we played, or is that something you’ve seen on your end? How are you approaching trying to make “outrun” as appealing as “outgun”?

Browder: I don’t know about appealing. I think players are always going to prefer blowing up ships to anything else they could do, which is totally fine. The data that I got back from the playtest you were in was that 30% of games ended with an artifact victory. It wasn’t the 30% that you were in, which is fair enough. I think our goal for artifact victories is not too far off from that. I would prefer closer to a 40% or 50% artifact victory rate, but I think 30% is okay. We’ll see what happens as the game evolves.

Artifact victories are a little harder to pull off than battle victories. You’ve got to read the map a little more carefully and understand where the gate is, where the artifact is. I don’t know, but I think once the audience becomes more practiced with the game, I think you’ll see artifact victories go up. Our internal numbers are closer to 40%, but we’re a small team. We’re playing in a little pod, right? We’re not out there playing with the greater community. We’ll find out.

But we have a lot of tools to manage that balance. It’s not hard to imagine like, if the gate opened at 6 minutes instead of 25, how many more artifact victories there would be. If the artifacts spawn closer to the gate, it’s not hard to imagine how much easier it would be to get an artifact victory. We’re not going to do a 6-minute gate, but you can understand what I mean about the tools that we have. I think they’re comprehensive. I think we can make it practical for that to be a strategy to win if we find that those numbers get too low.

Q: Wildgate is set to release sometime later in 2025. What does the road to the release date look like for you all?

Chayes: We have one of the next major beats coming up this week, on Thursday, when we start our community preview. Really excited to get a bunch of folks in who never had a chance to play. We’ll have that running over the course of the weekend going into Monday. The reason we do this is to sort of see where we still need to do some work. We feel pretty good about the game, but we know there’s going to be things to learn.

We learned some things about the early playtests that you were in and so made some tweaks. We’re going to do that again after this week. Then, we’ve probably got another phase of community preview going on after that. It’ll probably be a little bit longer, about a week or so.

We’re looking forward, beyond that, to figuring out how we can get this out to as many people as possible. That’ll probably be happening around the middle of summer or so. Again, one of the big things we’ve learned from previous places we’ve worked is the importance of iteration. The importance of learning what’s working and what’s not.

We’re very close to the game at this point. Some of us, like Dustin, have been on it for five years. There does come to a point where—while we’re very excited about it and this is our baby—we’ve been working on it for such a long period of time that we do need some fresh eyes to tell us where there’s more work to be done. So we’ve got a few phases of that to go. And then, if all goes well, as you said, we are looking to release it later this year.

Q: Is there anything else about Wildgate you’d like to add, to share with our readers?

Chayes: We’re super excited to get everybody to come check out the game. This is, again, something where we’ve got a team of folks who have been super passionate, working on this for about five years now. And the key thing about where we are now: this moves from a world where it’s just been ours for the last five years to something we’re sharing with the community. Everybody on the team is very passionate about that.

We know that this is a game that players out there are going to have strong opinions on, so please do share those. Please let us know what you think. We do see this very much as a partnership, and are looking forward to getting everybody’s thoughts.

Browder: Yeah, absolutely. This is a big game – in the sense that there are a lot of weird things you can do. It’s a very sandbox-style experience in the sense that how you choose to approach the various problems is really up to you as the crew. Do you want to go for the artifact quickly? Are there too many or not enough artifact wins?

So, please come in and break Wildgate with us. Come in and show us. You know what this game is capable of. Show it. Show us the strategies we’ve never considered, so we can either fix them if they’re a problem or lean into them if they’re cool, if they make the game better. Maybe there’s something that’s almost doable, but it’s just a little too hard for most players to accomplish. Maybe only the best streamers can do it. But would it be cool if everybody could do it?

Those are things that we’re excited to see. Where can the game go? It’s almost a little more amazing. What can we do to make those things happen? So I really encourage everybody to come and sign up for our playtest. Come help us figure out how to make this game better.

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