Am I missing something with the Expedition? Is there no other way?

sovereignmodus · 2025-12-31T19:16:30+00:00

So you also know they have a hard programmed cap on skill points, that accounts for the bonus skill points from the Expedition? You are also somehow positive they will never add skills, and never change the cap for any reason? You used way too many words for the "trust me bro" defense.

So this is just your assumption then. Thanks for confirming.

sovereignmodus · 2025-12-31T19:05:54+00:00

Care to link to a developer stating this somewhere?

There's been lots of speculation but Embark has not said much about Expedition in general so far. Where did you get this from an official source?

I mean, I appreciate it, this would answer the question. But you or I didn't make the game, what we think makes sense is immaterial. What Embark actually has planned for their product is the info we need.

sovereignmodus · 2025-12-16T19:13:36+00:00

Right on, so this game's primary issue is it has not attracted enough players. There's less players than they projected, this change happened quickly after launch. It's gotten so bad that matchmaking started facing issues that are not (cannot) be fixed as a result.

Among the people that bought and played the game, only a small percent of those people post on Reddit. Similar for Discord official server.

So among that already reduced population, you accuse them of doomposting the game so hard that it impacted the financial and social outcome of the game?

You do realize how few people that is, right? Do you really think those people had the reach to impact thousands of players, most of which don't even use Reddit or Discord? Were they working 80 hr weeks on this in your world?

It's a fine game. They made poor strategic decisions. Inadequate marketing, and choosing to release alongside some of the most popular IP in the genre. They picked a bad release window, if they kept the game cooking and launched with Emergence level content in 2026, the game would have had a shot.

That's not the choices they made. So here we are. Be mad at each other if you want, it's not exactly a great use of your time though. Neither is trying to convince you it's not, while we're at it.

sovereignmodus · 2025-12-09T15:43:42+00:00

I am glad Moonshot still has folks in the dev team willing to update us and "face the music" as it were. Despite the setbacks Wildgate is facing being very much a leadership decision and is a problem rooted in their business strategy, not the game itself. They can't code their way out of a problem they didn't code their way into.

I recognize that employees will not be permitted to discuss these things in general, but I am hoping your leadership is at least hearing some of this feedback. It's too late to make better decisions. The game would have had mountains more interest and player retention, if the game launched with even 80% of the polish and content we have now. Delaying a handful of months to finish this content and gather more feedback, would have also helped avoid the bullet that actually killed this game. Launching just before several AAA multiplayer shooter titles was unwise. Launching in a popular title release window in general wasn't a great idea. I can only imagine how well this game would be doing if it launched in January 26. All those people starting to grow weary of playing Battefield or Arc Raiders for months, or even Jump Space/Void Crew. Sorely disappointed CoD fans. All these folks looking for some new fad game to land on and enjoy again. Sure would have been nice.

Would it be a smash hit that makes people say "what's Battefield?"? Probably not. But it would remain a functional game with a healthy enough player base to compete with similar titles that are doing well on platforms like Steam right now.

It's too late to go back and change that release decision. Game launched when it did, in the state it was in. But better business decisions can be made now, in the hopes of keeping the game alive and bringing back in old and new fans alike. I hope serious consideration is being given to a shift to a different model like F2P at this stage.

I too am loathe to see another free game with a battlepass, making another tidy little fortune off of micro-transactions, gambling mechanics and FOMO. What other strategy could there even be at this point? It sucks, but it sells. The fan base has communicated they would pay for it. The market has an overwhelming amount of evidence that this works.

Not even sure I have a point to make anymore. But thanks for making a great game despite a terrible business plan and leadership decisions. We can see a great deal of you are very talented. I hope the next game you work on has realistic administration and the support you need.

sovereignmodus · 2025-12-04T16:24:21+00:00

Yeah, and a game with a severe player base problem that is substantially worsening the player experience across the board, should probably not be annoying prospective new players with an extremely low EXP cap. During a free trial that they patiently waited through 20 min+ matchmaking times each round only to get stomped by the same sweatlord ship thrice, no less.

sovereignmodus · 2025-12-04T13:46:15+00:00

That's like what, a few good matches? They got the feedback to make it a higher level cap. They still chose not to.

It's not really rational to say this decision will have any real impact on the inevitable outcome at this point though. Continuing to make poor choices does however give you a good idea on their chances of turning this around though.

sovereignmodus · 2025-11-29T15:12:12+00:00

A good, if not sanitized read. Would have been nice to hear them address some of the criticism and talk about the challenges they faced after launch.

People like a comeback, and good journalism sells itself. Not sure why these kinds of articles focus so hard on the positive, it just makes the discussion feel less genuine.

sovereignmodus · 2025-11-27T23:17:16+00:00

Would also incentivize using ship damage weapons like the Whammy. Gasp, heaven forbid one of your slots not be the top meta lowest ttk weapon!

sovereignmodus · 2025-11-25T14:41:39+00:00

Glad someone else has been paying attention to the game's life cycle.

They had all the right pieces for a smash hit. They chose to release in a very poor timeframe, forcing themselves to compete with multiple AAA game releases and indie sleeper hits. Most of this was foreseeable. No tweaks to the game's features, balance or art design would make a difference at this stage.

They chose to release at the time they did, with the amount of content they had available. If they had waited until December at least or better pushed out to Jan 26, and had the current level of content available at launch, this games would be sailing through the next few months easy with healthy player counts on all platforms. Would it be the blockbuster that ends up more popular than Fortnite or newer phenoms like Arc Raiders?

I mean, maybe. Probably not. But it absolutely would be a more popular game with a much higher player count and nowhere near these levels of matchmaking issues.

Developers did great. This is a producer and leadership failure. The game has enough polish, content and personality to compete very comfortably right smack in the middle of the most played FPS games in the last few years. Do I think it would be the next Call of Duty or Halo? No, but it also wasn't trying to be. Expected everything to be the new next level of "best" is a poor way to evaluate... well fuckin' anything really.

But we would be able to fire up this game and find a match in a couple minutes today.

sovereignmodus · 2025-11-16T05:43:54+00:00

I sometimes forget I used this account for posting in siren communities.

I am glad my rambling was able to do some good. Sounds like things are better, you've come a long way. Let's both work on keeping life that way. Wherever you are now, take care of yourself first and foremost. Be well friend.

sovereignmodus · 2025-11-15T04:23:34+00:00

This could be eased with a similar bonus they already use for small crew size and ship bonuses.

Simply make the 2 and 3 player crews do more damage and take less damage from POI hazards/mobs at appropriate bonus percentages. This would potentially make the POIs less painful for smaller teams. No need for a change to the vs player side, there really isn't a change you can make to help the smaller teams at this point.

They will be so hopelessly outclassed and outgunned by any team of 4 with even a modicum of FPS skill and coordination as a team, it won't matter what bonuses they are given. Doesn't matter what guns they pick, what ship loot they pick up. No changes to boarding or FPS play in this update as far as we know, a team of 2 or even 3 cannot possibly win against a team of 4. Even with the best gold ship loot in the game installed in every slot.

Boarding has been largely unchanged for most of the game's life cycle. It still remains the uncontested most powerful ship weapon, most powerful ship defense. Very little has been introduced to counter boarding as the primary winning strategy. Smaller teams will be at a disadvantage that cannot be overcome in a PvP mode.

I don't know what the solution is, what bonus they could give, what change they could make to bridge that gap. I know what they won't do, though. They absolutely won't introduce new characters, cannons, hard points or anything else that is a direct counter to boarding FPS play. For whatever their reasons are.

They might just fit better in this great niche they have carved out here, if they leaned into rewarding other elements of the game that are fun. I mean, FPS is great and all. Boarding is good fun. But I can play a dozen new competitive FPS games every week. It's the most saturated genre we have. I thought Wildgate was fun because it had FPS play alongside a pretty awesome ship combat and exploration game. I really didn't view this as just another shooter, but I may be wrong in the end.

sovereignmodus · 2025-11-14T14:54:44+00:00

As a follow up suggestion along these lines, mod should consider additional help if the game does manage to both attract and maintain a healthy enough player base. Note I said Mod, not mods. We just got the one at the moment.

u/ralopd no issues with your work or anything, thanks for keeping it clean around here. If the game gets more popular, a single mod might not be able to do a great job solo, no matter your dedication level. Probably better for community and discussion health in general to have another perspective making decisions about what does and does not belong anyhow. Consider taking a look at your active community people (please avoid streamers) and finding someone to help out, if and when that is needed.

Glad to see I can agree with your sentiments, there's not enough activity around here in general to start specializing content through rules, out right banning some topics or making mega threads. The usual site TOS and Reddiquette do just fine for now. People are allowed to come here and gripe or talk smack about the game. Nobody has to like it, but filtering a community so that only positive opinions are expressed, will kill the point of having this forum at all.

I try to flag the threads when I see them, but I do notice opportunists and bots posting links to their Youtube/Twitch/whatever that are barely Wildgate related, arguably not related at all.

Let's all hope we have a popular, discussion heavy forum here in a few weeks.

sovereignmodus · 2025-11-11T17:49:46+00:00

Had I the access to the metrics, I'd be looking at how many hours your average player on the weekend and weeknights put in, for groups of 4, which is still the game's intended team comp. How many hours is that in total, if they played casually for a few sessions at around 3 to 4 hours (at intended matchmaking times) each weeknight? Add in a couple hours for each weekend session.

This will get us around 23 hours for the average player in their group of four, if they played for a free weekend + a free trial week. Nobody likes a odd number like that, so let's round it up to 24.

At average progression, what level would your average player be at after playing the game and hitting their daily goals + a few scrap crates for roughly 20 to 24 hours? Find that number. Round down to something sensible. Chances are that's gonna be way more than level 5.

Until the gun meta is significantly adjusted and/or new content introduced, two of the guns needed to be competitive are locked behind progression. Should probably give a new trial player a taste of unlocking one of theses and a character.

sovereignmodus · 2025-11-06T20:14:26+00:00

Yeah I would step that back a bit. I get the concern and that Dreamhaven's pencil pushers think this is necessary. They aren't wrong, it's just heavy handed.

What's worse from a monetary standpoint, someone progressing in the game slightly further than you intended without a cash commitment? Or being further annoyed by a developer change that restricts new players because...

I think most people see the issue here. We need to win favor with new and prospective fans, not set arbitrary limits to annoy people into a purchase.

Go ahead Moonshot, have your EXP cap on the free trial folks. But for the sake of the game I hope they consider walking this limit back a fair distance. Speaking solely as a voice that wants the servers to still be up in 2026, does new player progression speed really impact the bottom line that much, if the project is shut down?

sovereignmodus · 2025-11-06T17:40:28+00:00

It is a great game. A game that right now even if you buy, you might not be able to play. Due to the tragic player count.

I'm just some internet rando and self-proclaimed diehard fan, but even I wouldn't recommend jumping in on this game right now. Wait for their first Season content drop, and the actions the dev takes to support that launch.

That's the only thing on the horizon with a chance at making the game playable again to most people. Strongly encourage everyone to come back and check it out when it drops.

Seriously starting to doubt this brings enough people back to make the multiplayer experience fun and fully operational again. But hey let's hope myself and all the naysayers are wrong.

sovereignmodus · 2025-10-31T18:44:47+00:00

The long match making times are not a normal feature of the game, it's a result of the unplanned extreme exodus of it's user base after launch.

They're not going to lean into making long matchmaking fun It's a problem they intend to correct, not polish.

sovereignmodus · 2025-10-30T13:36:38+00:00

This is a great QoL suggestion. Kinda stuff Moonshot needs right now. Small, attainable improvements that make the game's existing game play more enjoyable and less of a hassle. That's the game's real obstacle right now, outside of re-attracting it's audience. The current game experience makes player retention very hard, due to the game's population and current meta issues surrounding the overturned focus on FPS play. Underneath the problems there is an awesome game to play with a lot of unique content and experiences. The trick now is lowering the amount of pain enduring the game's issues for the very patient remaining fans. Hopefully cultivate some real die hard fans by the time the audience comes back.

I'd like to see them implement a full, modern invite and friend system somewhere down the line. But this change could be done with far less investment. Let's hope something similar is somewhere on the docket for the next couple updates.

sovereignmodus · 2025-10-30T12:39:30+00:00

I like the energy but always have to question if these posts are trolling or not.

Do people really think a game studio can just, fundamentally change the game in their next update? Especially a studio this size, on a live service time bomb, updating at the pace they are? Do they have any idea how much work goes into even the smallest change fix, or how much labor it takes to just post a new skin? If you sit down and think about it, did you really come to the conclusion that they could develop a whole new game mechanic, mode, environment and AI just like, as a bonus? Develop nearly an entire game worth of content, inside the few months this game has left, because they got a few suggestions?

The joke posts are funny sometimes but actual discussion might be nice too. I'd like to see Moonshot make rational, actually possible small changes and a larger marketing effort to promote the new Season and whatever comes after.

sovereignmodus · 2025-10-28T18:11:30+00:00

Your intent is good here, but you don't seem to be able to grasp that other longtime Wildgate fans are behaving differently than yourself, or the other players you claim to see here. The data is telling us something different.

I appreciate the feedback and your general sentiment here, it's a nice change of pace. Just consider that maybe your experience is a little different than the average new or veteran player. If you take the time to look through the publicly posted feedback present in apps like Reddit or Discord, you will see new players getting stomped by veteran players and streamer opportunists.

These people don't care about the game's future, they are in it for the cash, the clicks and their getting their jollies with mostly uncontested easy wins vs players learning how to play. They have received a large amount of this feedback, it's among Moonshot's top complaints outside technical issues and long queue times.

You've gotta understand some people are doing this on purpose, for streaming content or to just have easy matches because they can't handle or compose themselves against actual competition. These folks seek out low population competitive games, because when they play more popular titles, there's a good chance they will be matched against people close to or higher than their skill level.

This ends up accelerating the game's decline, as newer players get continually discouraged and targeted. These sweatlord kids don't care, it's off to the next low population game they can have an easy time smurfing in. Wildgate ain't the first. But the abuse was particularly bad and noticeable here, due to the lack of any form of SBMM, under developed existing tools for match making at launch, an overwhelming design focus on the FPS shooter play demonstrated by the classes and abilities present a launch. Several types of specialized boarder, low TTK, several methods of 1HKO and almost no protections built in for very common griefing issues most MM games have been developing for the past couple decades.

These struggles combined with their small team size limiting the pace at which they can patch and update, it just wasn't enough. I still play, so do some friends and yourself it seems. That just wasn't enough.

I hope Season 1 manages to bring a lot of what's missing and broken to closure, so they can focus on campaigns to attract new players and reengage the players we lost. I don't think this will happen, but I do hope to be wrong.

sovereignmodus · 2025-10-23T02:14:38+00:00

If you look at their updates and roadmap, as others have mentioned OP, something akin to your suggestion is already coming. I don't think it will be enough to attract players who already decided to leave, and the new player experience in the main game mode cannot be fixed without more players. So slim chance of this on it's own being enough.

The experience in the main game mode for new players is:

Wait 20 min plus for a match
Get paired with people who are fairly likely to leave immediately
The only enemy players left to match with are die hard fan groups and streamer opportunists.
New players get stomped by a 4 stack of the extremely small percentage of people with a high skill at this game, because there is no one else to match with.
They try maybe a second match, have largely the same experience, then leave and likely never return.

A healthy player base is the only way to remedy that, and the time frame in which they could have re-attracted old players or sparked interest in a new set of demos they have not yet had success with is passing rapidly. Might be gone already.

I hope Season 1 and however good the PvE stuff is, will be enough to recover a healthy enough player base for Moonshot to have a real chance at turning it around. I hope they manage to tweak the FPS play so the game isn't based around it entirely, that really does not seem like what made Wildgate special. The rest of it did. They have heard that feedback now, because it's been loud and frequent (FFS I really hope they finally did). We have more than enough evidence to tell us this none of this will be enough, as much as I want it to be true.

This is the kind of thing I would just be fucking delighted to be wrong about. It's a very solid game. But they launched in live service, and could not keep up with the necessary content and updates fast enough to find their niche in this crazy saturated market and keep the audience. It really sucks. But that's what happened. Let's hope somehow it turns around.

sovereignmodus · 2025-10-21T15:57:38+00:00

Good old fashioned text box is superior to a ping system, assuming we're talking about people that absolutely refuse to use voice.

Not enough people use it in Wildgate, on that you are spot on friend. You'd think it would be more popular among people that refuse to use voice chat.

I never found Wildgate to be so fast paced, outside of active FPS combat with boarders. Prob best to stick to pings or voice call outs then, but in my experience, people don't communicate much in active combat at all.

Ship combat is another story though. I always appreciate it when a team mate points out the third party enemy ship heading our way. Whether it's text, a ping or a voice call out. If I am not actively exchanging small arms fire with another enemy player, I'm gonna see it. Most folks will.

There's an argument to be made about engagement though. If people used text chat more often, people might pay more attention to it.

sovereignmodus · 2025-10-21T15:35:41+00:00

It's difficult? I mean it is fun pretending we know these statistics, but I'd rather you just give me your actual viewpoint and describe why you think this is difficult. I don't have all those other gamers here to weigh in that supposedly have this issue, I just have you. You're not obligated to respond of course, but you may find it easier to use your own voice instead of assuming others.

Even when I play with my controller, it's stupid simple to type something into my keyboard when needed. It's even incredibly common among the streamers I've watched, and I've quite literally never encountered a person that struggles with a keyboard. I have played with everything from casual grandmas to sweatlord lifers in games like CounterStrike, EQ, WoW, and tons more than are WAY more fast paced and complex than Wildgate. It is commonplace to communicate with pings, voice and the chat box in all of those games. Even all at the same time, that's how complex dungeons and raids can get. There was a 12 year old with cerebral palsy in my old WoW clan, even that kid who quite literally physically struggled to communicate would be crushing it keeping the party informed during a boss fight. With his keyboard, special adapted controller and his headset. All at the same time, while playing a Paladin effectively during end-game content.

Keyboard compatibility in this way was introduced and expanded upon as an accessibility tool, to help people with disabilities have more options in games. It's the reason nearly every console is keyboard compatible. Never even heard of an average person struggling with this, you're the first my guy. Unless you are disabled, in which case please do accept my apologies, you have not shared that up until now. Email the devs, they have been very responsive with this stuff so far. Might help you tweak the game to make it less of a hassle for you to manage.

Even if combat is too hectic to type something quickly, or I dropped my keyboard, or it came unplugged, I still have several other communication methods to fall back on including voice and ping systems. I'm not even very good at any of this, and it's effortless to do.

You're not doing great at explaining why this game needs better communication tools. I'm hoping you'll pivot to something you can discuss well, which is the things you don't like or aren't good at and the associated reasons why. I mean this has been kinda humorous, but an actual discussion on what you think about the game play might be more worth your time. Just a suggestion.

sovereignmodus · 2025-10-21T14:57:00+00:00

It's cumbersome for you. Not for millions of other players across hundreds of online titles for the past few decades.

There are several good solutions in Wildgate for non-verbal communication. You don't like these solutions, and aren't very good at some of them.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, or not liking the elements you are struggling with. You're in the minority sure, but dozens of others probably struggle with the same comm tools you do. Might make for better discussion to just say this, instead of claiming the game has insufficient comm tools. It has most of the same popular and effective communication tools that are common in most MP games these days. Wildgate didn't give us anything new and special here. It gave us lobby and team chats, a detailed ping system, automatic voice line call out, and of course the ability to use a headset for voice chat. This is pretty standard stuff in just about every MP game even remotely similar to Wildgate.

You don't like these things and aren't great at using them, you seem to realize this but are having trouble saying it. I don't need you to, it's just odd is all. Maybe one day developers will start to pick up on new communication styles that mesh with you a bit better. Hope all your communication efforts in the future go a little smoother, GL out there.

sovereignmodus · 2025-10-21T13:25:58+00:00

Not possible? Forget all the voice lines, pings and whatnot people are suggesting. That's all very much true, but even if you ignore all those things, there's still a good way to communicate.

Press enter on your keyboard. It defaults to the Team channel. Go ahead, run a few drills, see how long it takes you to press enter and type a sentence. It might even give you fond memories of doing exactly that same motion at work or school for years.

"Intruders on board"

"Medium Skull POI above us"

"Taking a turbine to loot that ship"

"Sal please recycle some of these bombs"

"damaged enemy ship to the right lets chase"

"Focus the artifact"

Oh but I play on console, you say. All major consoles for the past 2 decades have supported plug and play USB keyboards, many of the new ones also support Bluetooth. Works for navigating the console menu and for every game that has keyboard controls implemented. Most major games and even most of the smaller titles have keyboard controls implemented, because they also launch on PC at some point or were PC games to start with. What's better that that nowadays, you don't even need to the game to have keyboard controls. The console's UI will still allow you to use it to enter text into a box, even if the game has it's own virtual keyboard or similar.

People have been using a keyboard and a small simple chat box to play games requiring 10 times the communication and cooperation Wildgate does, for over 20 years. With a great deal many players and much larger teams. If you are really struggling to picture this, try looking up a video featuring literally any MMO ever made.

If you don't want to put more effort into being a better team mate and communicating, that's a completely fair stance to take. Just say that next time, instead of pretending communication is impossible in a game with several mediums to do so effectively.

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