Bulkhead is pumping the brakes on Wardogs. In a new studio podcast covered by PCGamesN, executive producer Joe Brammer said the team tried to do too much with Season 2 and now needs to change course. “We’ve got to slow down,” he said. “We can’t do monthly seasons. We can’t keep up.”
Brammer was joined by lead game designer Pete Harries, creative director Tim Nightingale and technical designer Mark Tadros, and the group was blunt about what went wrong. Season 2’s economy wipe was undone almost immediately by leveling that moved far faster than the studio expected. “The whole season was too fast,” Brammer said, adding that even an unchanged progression curve from Season 1 would still have been too quick.
He also called the push to cram new content into Season 2 “a huge mistake on our part,” saying fears rooted in the collapse of the studio’s earlier shooter, Battalion 1944, led the team to rush things out instead of iterating. “The quality dropped,” he said. Players noticed, and the game’s recent Steam reviews slipped to Mixed, which Brammer said hurt sales over the weekend because Steam stops promoting games with weaker recent scores.
The new plan is three-month seasons with a smaller update about halfway through each one. Season 3 is currently targeted for Thursday, Nov. 12, which keeps the faster timeline Bulkhead announced when it pulled Season 3 forward after the Season 2 backlash. It will bring another economy reset, plus new limited, or “primitive,” servers that remove power weapons and vehicles to recreate the low-to-mid game for players who find the full sandbox frustrating.
The team is also trying to move away from the heavy vertical progression of Season 1, where the best gear sat at the very end of the tree. Nightingale said broader limits on equipment and vehicles have been discussed but could undercut the sandbox feel, while Harries suggested fuel could become a lever for controlling vehicles like the Havoc helicopter.
It has been a rocky few weeks for the early access shooter, which also drew complaints when Bulkhead capped ping at 175 to fight cheating. Brammer said he won’t ask anyone to change a review they believe in, but hopes players will “consider updating” their scores once they’re happier with where Wardogs is heading.
