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.
