It's tempting to dismiss every example of an underperforming game with a game design reason and it's certainly wrong to do so (because you could find similar reasons in games that did perform very well; if you want I can pick apart why Marvel Rivals shouldn't have worked) but... I do have one here
I call this one excessive novelty. Yes of course new things are good and should be encouraged. If gaming becomes nothing but annual COD and FIFA releases, that would be very sad. But for game designers it can be very tempting to chase novelty for novelty's sake.
I think the ship to ship combat in Wildgate may qualify here. I'm sure the extremely talented and qualified team did a lot of due diligence that they found a fun ship to ship loop and probably playtested the shit out of it, but in the end of the day it's not something that has worked before.
Sea of Thieves is the closest analogue I can think of, but it's different in so many ways, not least of all that it's a sandbox and not a zero-sum session based competitive game.
I think expressive mechanics like "run around a ship putting out fires and manually operate big cannons" fits way better into a sandbox game rather than the pressure cooker of a one team wins everyone else loses session based game.
Lots of reasons why this is IMO, but most of all: the amount of gameplay altering agency expressed through say just the ship flying loop is almost custom-built to break teams. Sure, you can lose in COD because your teammates keep dying, but it doesn't alter YOUR gameplay.
Really good thoughts! I agree, and I am concerned about what the gaming landscape looks like in 5 years because of all of the changes happening with the business today... can designers and devs even be rewarded for doing great work? Seems more like a crapshoot than a plan :(
To be fair, it looks like the folks at DICE are about to be rewarded for doing great work on BF6, but yeah, that's a "more of the same" kind of game. I'll point to things like Helldivers 2 for a semi-recent example of a novel game doing well, but it's all indie and AA.
That is to say, in Wildgate, what options you have available to you, how combat is or isn't joined, what strictures exist on your behavior (do I need to go repair? Can I get allies to join me on this POI?) depends on ally behavior. This makes people dislike the captain and makes no one want to fly.
So long story short, I think the major new innovation they brought might be a net negative for less coordinated play. If you're playing with your friends on voicechat it's probably a blast. If you're playing with randos, it's the worst. Games need to support play with randos to survive.