“We’ve got to slow down,” Wardogs developer admits after Season 2’s rocky rollout
Wardogs Season 2 has been a messier experiment that developer Bulkhead would have liked. Its economy wipe was too quickly erased by rapid leveling speeds, and the team admits that it made “a huge mistake” in attempting to stuff fresh content in at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the multiplayer game. To discuss the Season 2 rollout, the rapid Season 3 turnaround, and the team’s plans for the future, Executive Producer Joe Brammer is joined by Lead Game Designer Pete Harries, Creative Director Tim Nightingale, and Technical Designer Mark Tadros.
It was still weekend one of Wardogs Season 2 when Bulkhead announced it was planning to bring the Season 3 launch “significantly forward” (the team has since suggested it’s currently targeting Thursday November 12). “It kind of puts a sour taste in people’s mouths,” Nightingale admits. “They’re just thinking, ‘Oh well, how much do I invest in this season if it’s just going to reset again soon?'” Tadros says the faster progression of this update was designed to appeal to more casual players, but the rapid reset counteracted that exact audience.
Another oversight was that while Bulkhead expected players to naturally progress a little faster than they had in Season 1, where everything was completely new and unknown, it underestimated how big this shift would be. “We didn’t predict the numbers,” Nightingale remarks. “The whole season was too fast,” Brammer comments, “but if we had changed nothing [from Season 1] it would still have been too fast.”
The huge success of Wardogs was exciting for the team, but Brammer believes it actually had a negative impact on the studio’s confidence, and particularly in the ethos it had established in the months leading up to release. “I think that’s where my leadership failed. I kept saying, ‘We don’t have a plan.'” This led the team to react “too much” to player responses, and to attempting to rush new content into the game despite being adamant prior to launch that it wasn’t going to be doing so during early access.
“We were like, ‘There’s going to be a content problem,'” Brammer recalls. “People hit it and actually went further than we thought, and we were so worried about it.” He says this led to “a huge mistake on our part” of trying to stuff as much as possible into Season 2. “We let our fears and PTSD from Battalion 1944 [which Bulkhead refunded Kickstarter backers for after its failure to maintain a player base] get in our way.” The studio reversed course from its original plan of accepting that lack of new content to focus on core mechanics.
“We worked really hard: ‘More stuff, more things in Season 2, get it all in there,'” Brammer continues. “And you know what happened? The quality dropped. We didn’t double down on everything, the way we’ve iterated and iterated for years, thrown things away twice and kept the third one. We didn’t do that, we just pushed it out and went, ‘Look, there’s loads of content.’ They went, ‘Yeah okay, but the XP is broken.'”
“This weekend was a kick up the arse, really, wasn’t it?” Brammer admits, “We’ve got to slow down. We can’t do monthly seasons. We can’t keep up.” He suggests that three-month refreshes with a smaller update halfway through is the current plan. Alongside this, he says Bulkhead is trying to move away from the “heavy vertical progression” of Season 1, where “all of the ‘best stuff’ was at the end of the tree.”
Nightingale remarks that the team has considered implementing broader restrictions on when certain equipment or vehicles are available, but worries that it pulls away from the sandbox feel that defines Wardogs. “What I will say, though,” Brammer chimes in, “is that we agree with people where you finally shoot down a Havoc, one minute later a Havoc appears – it’s the same guy. We get that, and we don’t have a solution right now.” Harries suggests that fuel could provide the answer: “I feel like there’s something there with fuel that we haven’t quite had the time to really do something interesting with.”
As a workaround in the short term, Season 3 will introduce limited or ‘primitive’ servers to help “replicate the low-to-mid game” for those who find the curve frustrating. “Obviously on launch, we kind of want to have one unified experience,” Nightingale notes, though he says that the longer the game keeps succeeding, “the more we can sense what players like and don’t like, and then we can offer more experiences.”
Reflecting on Season 2, Brammer ponders, “We put ourselves in a situation where we were on the defensive, but did we ever need to be?” He asserts, however, that “I think we did, because we’re fighting against the Valve system. If we slip to mixed reviews, which we did for recent [reviews], we’ve got a problem. If we go to mostly negative, we’ve got to go to our board and answer questions. We’ve got business and investment issues – it’s a business at the end of the day, and we have to react to certain things.”
Brammer says he rushed out video responses after Season 2’s launch because “Steam’s algorithm doesn’t push you if your recent reviews slip to mixed. If you go to mostly negative, you’re just like bang, no advertising. So we didn’t sell many new copies of the game this weekend.” He points to instances of one review where a player praised the first “40 or 50 hours” of their playtime, but disappointment in Season 2 left them feeling mixed. Another delivered a negative response after investing 250 hours.
“The success we now suffer from is that people now assume immediately that we’re much bigger than we are,” Nightingale says. “We are testing every single day; there isn’t a point where we’re not testing and we’re not looking at these things.” He notes, “Live service is new for us in terms of the things we’ve got to really keep a beat on, understand where players are going to push back on things, changes that we make – what they’re going to like, what they’re not going to like.”
Wardogs Season 3 is currently scheduled for Thursday November 12, and will come with a fresh economy reset. It will also introduce limited servers that remove power weapons and vehicles from the mix. “Reviews matter to us,” Brammer writes, saying he won’t ask people to change a rating they believe in, but would ask players to “consider updating” their score once they feel happier with the shooter’s trajectory.