What is WARDOGS?

The one-sentence version, in the developer's words

BULKHEAD's own short description on the Steam store reads: “WARDOGS is a TACTICAL ALL OUT WARFARE FPS where one hundred players split across three teams fight over the control zone. Set in the derelict industrial mountains of Eastern Europe on a destructible battlefield where teamwork pays and cash is king.” Everything else on this page is that sentence unpacked. Note what it does not say: no battle royale, no extraction, no battle pass. Those three are not our reading of an absence — BULKHEAD has ruled each of them out in its own words, quoted further down. Whether the game has a ranked mode is a separate question people ask a lot, and one nothing official answers either way, so this page does not answer it.

The mode, in the order a match happens

One mode carries the game, and it is a King of the Hill descendant — BULKHEAD's design team spent years working with the creators of the original ARMA KOTH mod before building this. The steps below are the published rules, and nothing in them is inferred.

1. 01

   Three teams, one hundred players

   LONESTAR, VALKYRA and MANTICORE deploy into the same match. Three-way rather than two-way is the structural difference from almost every other large-scale shooter: the team in front is being fought by two other teams at once.

2. 02

   A 2 × 2 km Control Zone appears somewhere on a 256 km² map

   Its position is randomised per match. That is why the map's size matters to you before a shot is fired — the zone is 4 km² of a 256 km² battlefield, and getting there is a logistics problem the game expects you to solve with vehicles.

3. 03

   Presence scores, not kills

   “The team with the most players within the Control Zone earns points.” Standing in the zone is the scoring action. A player killing people outside it is not contributing to the score, which is the single rule most new players get wrong.

4. 04

   The Hot Zone doubles what you are worth

   A smaller sub-zone shifts around inside the Control Zone. Players inside it count double toward their team's count and earn double cash — BULKHEAD calls it “match-swinging potential”. Its size has never been published.

5. 05

   First team to 100 points wins

   That is the published win condition in full. How long that takes in minutes is not something BULKHEAD has stated, and this site is not going to convert points into a match length it has not measured.

What WARDOGS is not

The studio answered this head-on rather than leaving it to be inferred: “This isn't a Battle Royale. This isn't another Extraction FPS.” There is no shrinking circle, no last-player-standing, and nothing to extract with. On monetisation the phrasing is just as blunt — “No Battlepass. No Pay to Win. No Nikki Minaj Skins. No Bullshit. Earn cosmetics by playing.” It is worth knowing which of the genre's conventions this game has deliberately declined before you decide whether you want it.

• Not a battle royale — no circle, no elimination, no solo win
• Not an extraction shooter — nothing is carried out of a raid
• Not free-to-play — it is a paid game in Steam Early Access
• Not class-locked — roles are “totally player-defined”, built by what you buy
• Not battle-pass funded — cosmetics are earned by playing, per BULKHEAD

Cash, not loadout unlocks, is the actual system

Every player starts on $10,000 and buys a fresh loadout each life — weapons, gear, utility and vehicles all come out of the same balance. Teamplay actions are what pay: reviving squadmates, transporting friendlies to the zone, spotting, and holding the objective. Cash persists between matches, so a cautious match funds an expensive one. Profits can also be exchanged for gold bars, the endgame currency spent on cosmetic unlocks in the Gold Market. This is why the game describes itself as one where “every decision costs money”: dying is not just a respawn, it is the loss of what you spent.

The three factions

Named and described by BULKHEAD in its own announcement. The faction holding the zone is shown on the CONTROL line of the HUD. These are the published one-line identities and nothing more — no faction-specific weapons, bonuses or balance differences have been stated anywhere.

Who built it, where it is set, and what it runs on

WARDOGS is developed by BULKHEAD and published by Team17, both named on the Steam store listing. It runs on what BULKHEAD calls its “WAR DYNAMICS FRAMEWORK”, described as an enhancement of Unreal Engine 5 built to carry 100-player combat. The setting is Kolchia, a war-torn region fought over for PV-1, “a rare resource fuelling decades of Eurasian conflict”. Proximity voice chat is in, and BULKHEAD notes you can build loudspeakers to broadcast faction propaganda at the other teams — which tells you something about the register the game is aiming for.

What is genuinely unsettled

Three things get asked constantly and have no published answer, so this page does not give one. The size of the Hot Zone: stated to exist and to shift, never measured publicly. The length of a match: the win condition is 100 points, and points-per-minute has never been stated. Whether progression or currency survives the move out of Early Access: BULKHEAD has said nothing either way, and a question asked in a Discord is not an answer. Any site giving you a figure for these is giving you a guess with a confident font.

Common questions