Dreamhaven and Moonshot Games have unveiled Wildgate today. You can read a lot more about this interesting sci-fi PvP team-based first-person action/adventure game, including our first impressions from playing it, in this article. Here, we're reporting the full transcript of our press roundtable chat with Co-Founder and Game Director Dustin Browder, Studio Head and Producer Jason Chayes, and Business Lead Justin Lane. Enjoy!
Jason Fanelli (Gamespot): When did the team decide that four players was the sweet spot per group? Were there any experimentations with three, five, or even six players?
Dustin Browder: We did experiment quite a bit with one, two, three, and four players. When our team was very small, we could actually only summon about three players per ship to the game. In the early days, even only four ships. We had a very small crew when we began. Over time, the game sort of evolved into four, and there is some psychology around that number. It is hard to keep track of four, so the game feels kind of big but it's not completely insane. Ultimately, it felt pretty good to us.
We do allow players to choose not to fill their crew if they don't want to play with that many players, so you can hit play and choose yourself and two friends and jump into a game, and you're down a player. There are a few small advantages to doing that. There is a small crew bonus that kicks in if you're ever down a player that lets you respawn more quickly if you're killed on your own ship and automatically cools your reactor, healing your ship if you're damaged, so if you end up down a player, be it because you chose to or because somebody quit out, there is a little bit of a benefit.
It's not a huge, and you're not better off with three players, but you have a little bit of a benefit. But yes, we did experiment with smaller numbers of players and it was still a fun way to play. If you want to play that way, you're certainly allowed and even encouraged to do so, but for us, just through playtesting for years and years, four turned out to be the sweet spot. We never really tried five or six a lot. I think we had some periods where we had some bugs and it was possible to happen. It does start to feel even more insane with that many players per group. The game is already pretty nuts, so we settled on four.
ALESSIO PALUMBO (WCCFTECH): It felt quite a bit like playing Sea of Thieves. Would you say it's a fair comparison, albeit with the obvious differences?
Dustin Browder: I don't know. I think we like a lot of developers. We owe an enormous amount of debt and gratitude towards the games that have come before us that have inspired us. I think very clearly Sea of Thieves and Guns of Icarus are both wonderful inspirations for Wildgate. We also owe a lot, obviously, to Overwatch, which was a big inspiration for us. Fortnite was also a big inspiration for us. Apex Legends was a huge inspiration for us. It may be less obvious, but deeply inspiring to us was Subnautica, too. When Jason talks about awe and wonder and creating a believable and scary world full of spooky dangers, Subnautica is one of the best games in the world at that, and it was a big inspiration for us, as well.
Ben Hanson (MinnMax): Can you talk about the internal discussions about whether to make the game free to play, and what are the benefits for the payment model you landed on?
Justin Lane: Yeah. This was actually a huge discussion point for the studio over the course of many years. We went back and forth numerous times on this, but basically, where we landed on is a premium model, and the main reasons for that are kind of both internal and external. When we look at the market today and look at what's working well and where free-to-play and premium games are succeeding, we did feel like that was a good place for our game to be. We also explored our own internal capabilities both on the Moonshot side and our Dreamhaven publishing support side.
We are not a huge team, so building out the capabilities and the requirements and some of the loops that free-to-play requires was a very large task. So, in order to try to create the best experience for our players as well as support our studio, we landed on a premium price point.
Lorenzo Mancosu (Multiplayer.it): I understand it's an out-of-the-blue question. I know the focus of this playtest is the core gameplay loop. I really enjoyed what I have seen so far, but I'm curious to ask if you have already thought internally about other game modes because I feel like the core experience has enormous potential.
Dustin Browder: Oh, we certainly talked about it. We've gotten a lot of really great suggestions from the handful of folks who have had the opportunity to play. I think we're open to more game modes going forward. As you say, obviously at this point we got a lot on our plate, and we want to make sure this game mode really sings, but yeah, absolutely, it's not hard to imagine more game modes for this game as well as things that might be fun both for short periods and for very long periods. Any suggestions you guys may have, we're absolutely happy to hear.
Ben Hanson (MinnMax): What's the wildest design swing you tried during the game's development that you just couldn't balance?
Dustin Browder: That's a good one. I don't know. We can often balance things. We did experiment for a long time with just two player-ships, and I really enjoyed that. It ultimately was sort of a scope/balance issue as they were very difficult to get right against the three and four player-ships that we were experimenting with. In time, we finally focused on four player-ships, but that's sort of the one that got away from me. I'm like, I really wish we had a two-player ship, it added a lot of diversity to the silhouettes in the game. It was really cool, but there's a lot of work that goes into ships. It was hard to get it right, and we were like, we got to really knuckle down here and try to make some smart choices and really make sure that we could execute what we were trying to execute.
Jason Chayes: The one that comes to mind for me is not quite directly answering the question, but as you guys just saw, we're playing a lot with physics in the game. We've done a lot of tuning on how much damage physics can do. Having a little projectile fly out and hit a rock and seeing the rock fly across the Reach really fast is really cool. It feels a little different when you have a projectile that flies out and hits your ship and your ship starts spinning, especially when you have three or four people in there that see the whole thing start rotating. We've had cases where the ship is sort of flown across the reach at like 6,000 miles per hour and doing a rotation every second or two. That seemed cool in concept, but we don't want everybody throwing up when they play the game, so we had to dial some of that stuff back a bit. We are still working on some of that.
ALESSIO PALUMBO (WCCFTECH): As a follow-up to the business model question, some developers of online games have decided, whether right at launch or shortly after, to join a subscription service like Game Pass or PlayStation Plus in an effort to boost the community right away. Was, or perhaps still is, this a consideration for Wildgate?
Justin Lane: Yeah. Those are some very good tools to drive players into your community and to quickly grow just because it is a subscription service that can bring in many players to your game, so it's something that we have considered and that we are still considering in the future. Unfortunately we don't have a decision there at this point in time, but we definitely are thinking about it. We are working with our partners on the first-party side and will continue to iterate, and if something is meaningful there that we believe can support our players and our studio properly, it is something that we would definitely consider in the future.
Mike Straw (Insider Gaming): During the development and testing of the gameplay loop itself, was there a Eureka moment that made the team realize they had something special with Wildgate?
Dustin Browder: I think the game was very enthusiastic and passionate about this direction from day one. We have the benefit these days of working with tools like Unreal, where we can stand up prototypes very rapidly. Huge hats off to the Epic team for creating such an amazing technology for us to work with. We were having a lot of fun very quickly and I think the team was very excited, but there's definitely some moments that I can think of, and maybe Jason and Justin can add to this, but I remember when a developer on a team named Rick Gilliland (Technical Art) who put in something called the clamp jet, which is this device you can attach to any part of a ship and you can shoot it and it'll push the ship in that direction. You can use it inside your ship, you can use it outside your ship, you can use it inside enemy ships, outside enemy ships.
The whole thing is just a wonderful sort of tool in the sandbox to push ships around and to create new gameplay experiences. There's another developer named Luke who put in the tractor beam, where you can grab and move enemy ships and create sudden, shocking changes to the game state. Like, oh my God, they were over here and now they're over there, they were alive and now they're in a minefield. It really opened up our eyes to the potential of what players could do creatively in the space. There's another developer on a team named Sully who really likes to steal from enemy ships and is very good at sneaking around, watching how the enemy players are moving, and making a really smart psychological decision about, okay, they can't see me now, they're not paying attention. I can literally just walk on the ship and walk off with something.
That opened our eyes very much to the possibility of player agency, the possibility of players discovering new ways to play Wildgate. Obviously, when we see our own players do that, we are looking to support that style of play because it's something we haven't really done before. In a lot of games, when I see an enemy, I just pull the trigger. There aren't a lot of games where I see an enemy and deliberately choose not to shoot because there might be a real benefit to my team not firing. I have 50 wonderful game developers to work with, and each of them, at some point or another, has done something kind of out there that opened up our ideas to the possibilities of what the game could be. They've all had a pretty significant influence on what the game became.
Marco Wutz (GLHF): You mentioned the massive background story you've created. In which ways will players be able to experience that lore?
Dustin Browder: We have a number of tools in the game that provide some of that background, but right now, a lot of it is hidden away in the game. You're going to have to dig for it. For those of us who don't want to dig, you'll probably have to go to somebody's website who dug for you. It's not really served up to you through a campaign or a bunch of cut scenes yet. That's something we were not really working on, so you're going to have to dig into it and find it for yourself. That's how we're going to do it.
We also have, I don't know if you saw our adventure screens, but we have our adventure screens that have the rewards you can get and on those adventure screens is a big piece of key art and associated with that key art is a little bit of text which gives you a view into the universe. We'll be developing more adventures for our players going forward so they can see what rewards they're going to get, but then they'll also see some of the game's lore laid out in front of them.
Ben Hanson (MinnMax): What's the roadmap ahead? Is there a long public testing period? Do you have a window for a 1.0 release?
Jason Chayes: We do intend to do some public testing, but I wouldn't really call that super long public testing. Our goal is to have the 1.0 release this year, so I expect that over the summer, we'll be doing a lot of playtesting and getting a lot of feedback, seeing what we want to iterate on, but the timeframe that we're working towards here is working to over the course of the next several months as opposed to the next couple of years. In terms of the roadmap beyond that, we are looking to support ongoing new content for the game. We're looking at a seasonal structure where there'll be new releases every three to four months or so. The intention for that is to feature new things, like new Prospectors, new ships, new upgrades, and different versions of the Reach itself. Those will be coming out multiple times a year. We have lots of ideas for what we want there for the first few years as well.
ALESSIO PALUMBO (WCCFTECH): What degree of player and/or ship customization is there planned for the final game?
Dustin Browder: You can already see in the game that we have today that you can choose your Prospector; you can choose the two weapons the Prospector is going to carry and the two pieces of equipment that the Prospector is going to carry as well. It's really kind of a light hero builder; you can really set up the hero that you want to be and how you want to configure the character. I hope we have enough variations in the weapons. We have bullets that auto-track with the aiming, we have a heal gun that can also do damage to enemies. We got the beam rifle, which is more of a sniper weapon. There are a bunch of different weapons, short range, long range, all of that. We're hoping to keep adding to that library of things and keep building the capability for you to customize the weapons that your character is carrying. For the equipment, you've got things like shield generators or drill charges that damage enemy ships, or you've got extra ammo you can carry if you want something a little easier to play. There's 10 or 11 different pieces of equipment.
When it comes to cosmetics, if you see in the build today, you can choose a skin for your character, a skin for your weapon, and you can choose emotes and sprays and fireworks that you want to shoot off of your ship. There's all kinds of cosmetics for your character. There are cosmetics for the ships as well. Right now, we're not having players change the strength of their ship. You choose which type of ship you want to take, but if I've got a Hunter that's going to be the same as your Hunter, short of the cosmetics. You're not going to be 'I want to choose different upgrades on the ship before the game'. We want a very even playing experience for our players before they jump into a game, so if I've got a Hunter and you've got a Hunter, we understand what that is. Then, once in the game, obviously, you're going to customize the heck out of that ship with the equipment that you find.
Ben Hanson (MinnMax): I love the probes. Was it a challenge to hit the right amount of nods to the team's history with Starcraft?
Dustin Browder: I don't know. Obviously, like I said, we are super inspired by Subnautica. We're obviously inspired by games that we've worked on in the past, Hearthstone and Starcraft being both prominent. In our case, I think for the probes in particular I didn't really think about how similar you might imagine them to be to a Protoss probe. That's interesting; I'd sort of forgotten that, but you're quite right, there is a similarity there. For the probes, we knew that players were going to need information. We knew that long before we had our cloud tech working, long before we had procedural generation working for our asteroids, even back when a map was just a map and it was the same map every time, we knew that players were going to need to explore, that they would want to have the capability to poke their head out and look around.
When making Wildgate, Jason and I used to talk about this quite a bit: how it really wants to be a bunch of connected little games pushed together. There's a gunnery game, and there's a piloting game, and there's a probe game, and there's a mining game, and there's a PVE game. We really wanted to make sure that we created all of these little experiences that, hopefully, together, would create a convincing tapestry, a convincing illusion that you are on a spaceship adventure with your friends. The probe game was envisioned very early on as an information-gathering game because we were looking for different types of games. How can I fight people but also how can I explore? The probe game was always a big part of that. We worked on it quite a lot, that one went through quite a lot of iteration to end back more or less where it started, which is I get on this thing and go out and scan and acquire information that helps my team be successful.
Lorenzo Mancosu (Multiplayer.it): How does the procedural generation of the playable area work? Do you have a set number of field archetypes hazards, and environments? Do you plan to add more variations in the future? Even from a purely environmental art perspective, fighting over a planet or a moon would be really cool.
Dustin Browder: I won't go into all the details; I don't even know them all, there's so many possibilities. The asteroids are all procedurally generated. We do have the idea of thick asteroids versus normal asteroids versus thin asteroids. We do have cosmic storms and leeches and turrets and space mines and those are all bespoke pieces of art that we've created. We're not inventing a new type of leech procedurally. There is a Reach leech that you can encounter. We absolutely do plan on adding more stuff going forward, that's one of the things that we're very excited about this area of the game. We are really trying to create an environment that is really big, and that feels really big, and that implies that there's a lot more out there that remains unexplored. The Reach is hundreds of light years across. We want to create a space that is the most terrifying place in the galaxy to have a battle in where there's always more stuff happening. You can absolutely expect the team to keep adding to that space, adding new loot, new types of threats, new types of points of interest, new enemies AI, all of those types of hazards. And I love your idea of fighting over a planet or moon. That sounds super cool.
Thank you for your time.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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