Dreamhaven Reveals Sunderfolk Release Date And New Multiplayer Shooter Wildgate
A full slate for 2025.
If you missed it when it was first announced, Sunderfolk is a co-op RPG heavily inspired by board games, designed for local multiplayer. Each player takes control of a different anthropomorphic animal representing an RPG class — a weasel rogue, a bat bard, and more. The twist with Sunderfolk is that while the game plays out on a shared screen, like the television your console is plugged into, each player controls their character from their own smartphone. That allows the game to share relevant information with each player without interrupting everyone else’s flow.
First announced back in October 2024, the multiplayer RPG Sunderfolk is made by the relatively young studio Dreamhaven, helmed by former Blizzard Entertainment CEO Mike Morhaime. Dreamhaven had been working on the secret project for years, only slowly revealing more information about its upcoming slate of games, including a release date for Sunderfolk, in a showcase presented by Geoff Keighley. The show features two games developed by Dreamhaven and two published by the studio, and we’ll see the first of them launch in under a month.
Sunderfolk is designed to be played in person with each player using their smart phone.
While the Sunderfolk trailer didn’t unveil any new details about Sunderfolk’s gameplay, it did reveal its release date. Sunderfolk will launch on consoles and PC on April 23, and a demo is available immediately on GeForce Now, where it will be available until April 7.
The second internal game Dreamhaven revealed is Wildgate. It’s a rough time to launch a multiplayer first-person shooter right now — just ask Concord — but Wildgate is trying something a bit different from the rest. The game pits five teams of four players each, all vying to extract an artifact from its procedurally generated maps.
Teams can follow multiple paths to victory. One is capturing the elusive artifact, but each team arrives on the map in a spaceship, and destroying every other team’s ship can also net you a win. Rounds look incredibly chaotic, with each player choosing whether to chase the artifact, eliminate rival players, mine resources to empower their ship, or take down competing ships. In addition to ground-based combat, Wildgate also features ship-to-ship battles. Wildgate is set to launch sometime in 2025 on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Signups are open now for a playtest running from April 10 to 14.
Wildgate features ship-to-ship and ground combat in chaotic multiplayer rounds.
Dreamhaven’s presentation also showed off two games the studio is publishing, developed by other studios. Lynked: Banner of the Spark is a top-down action game mixed with cozy life sim elements like farming and town-building. Lynked is currently available in Steam Early Access, but it’s not staying there for long. On May 22, Lynked will release as a full game on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. The full release also concludes the currently unfinished storyline and adds an entirely new biome along with additional weapons and upgrades along the way.
Dreamhaven has also acquired Mechabellum, an auto-battler strategy game that left Early Access last year. With Dreamhaven now handling publishing duties for indie developer Game River Studio, the game will receive support as it continues to add updates. To kick off the new partnership, Mechabellum will be free to play on Steam from April 4 to 8, and a premium edition of the game including new skins and avatars is available now.
The short presentation was packed with new details for the studio, the most unexpected of which being its ambitious multiplayer shooter, Wildgate. While it’s still too early to tell if it will be able to escape the fate of other recently released multiplayer shooters, its upcoming playtest should shine some light on how it stacks up. Based on our preview last year, Sunderfolk could have the makings of a hit, if it finds the right, local co-op loving audience when it launches next month. It’s clear that founder Morhaime is driving the studio in an ambitious direction, prioritizing unusual multiplayer experiences with Dreamhaven’s in-house studios. We’ll know very soon how well that drive is paying off.
