You are mid-fight, holding a doorway with your team, when you hear footsteps through the wall. Except the footsteps are not your fault. One of the two enemy teams has been running past your position for the last two minutes, and because of the way voice chat works in WARDOGS, you can hear them talking the whole time. You have to decide in about a second whether that noise means a full squad is about to crest the roof or one guy is just walking past and chatting to his friends.
That tiny moment is the whole point of the game. WARDOGS is the 100-player tactical FPS from BULKHEAD, published by Team17, and it entered Steam Early Access on September 10. It launched at 5pm BST with a new "PLAY LIKE YOU USED TO" trailer, a $39.99 price, and a launch that came with some genuinely big numbers behind it.
Let's get the numbers out first, because they are the easiest part to believe. The August closed beta drew nearly half a million unique players. The final pre-launch test, run in the days before the release, peaked at 245,118 people on Steam at the same time. For a game that had never been on sale, that is a serious turnout. The studio's own summary of what the beta players kept saying back to it: they had not had this much fun in an FPS in years.
What a WARDOGS match actually is
Strip away the marketing language and the game works like this. One hundred players drop onto a large, destructible battlefield set in the derelict industrial mountains of Eastern Europe. They are split into three rival teams, so it is never a clean two sides. Every map has three variations, and the ground state changes the whole time because players can build, break, drive, and shoot their way through it.
The pieces that matter are the ones that change how you play from moment to moment:
- Local voice on all three teams. You can hear enemies as easily as allies. That is the feature that produces the clips, and it is the reason a match feels social instead of mechanical.
- Destructible buildings and terrain. Cover is temporary. A wall that saved you three minutes ago can be a hole if someone brings the right tool to it.
- Vehicles and construction. Shooting is only part of the job. You are also moving, building, and reshaping the battlefield as it happens, which means no two rounds feel identical.
What it is not: it is not a battle royale. There is no single winner at the end of a shrinking circle. It is not an extraction shooter either. The win conditions are closer to all-out warfare, and the studio is careful to call it tactical rather than twitch-only. The three-team split is what keeps it chaotic in a way two-sided shooters do not usually manage, because there is always a third option, and it is usually against you.
The price, and what Early Access actually costs you
WARDOGS goes into Early Access at $39.99, and the studio has set up a stepped pricing model around that. In plain words: the earlier you buy, the less the price increases over time. It is a way of rewarding the people who are willing to play through the rough parts without charging everyone the full version 1.0 price before every big feature has shipped. Whether that is the right trade for you depends on how much you care about a polished launch and how much you care about being in during the first hundred thousand hours of gameplay.
BULKHEAD is also honest about the timeline, which is more than most Early Access games manage. The current expectation is roughly one to two years in Early Access. The studio has deliberately not promised a rigid roadmap. The planned work is the usual list of things that sound boring until you realize how many games never do them: expanding content, improving systems, refining balance, and responding to player feedback. If you want a finished, settled product right now, this is a game to wishlist and wait on. If you want to help a 100-player shooter find its shape while watching the numbers climb, the door is open today.
"WARDOGS is ambitious, rough around the edges and still has a long way to go, but that is exactly what Early Access should be. We are putting the game in players' hands, listening to what they tell us and taking the risks needed to turn it into something that can last," said Joe Brammer, CEO at BULKHEAD. "More than anything, we want people to get online, talk to each other and have the kind of fun in an FPS that we grew up having."
A $100,000 clip contest on day one
To mark the launch, BULKHEAD is running the WARDOGS $100K Clip Contest. The structure is unusual enough that it is worth explaining. The best overall clip wins $100,000 in real cash. The other 99 entries in the Top 100 each get $100,000 in WARDOGS in-game cash, which sounds like a joke until you remember that cash is a core part of how the game works. The money is there to push the local voice feature hard. The best clips are going to come from moments where you can hear what went wrong before it goes wrong, and the studio knows it.
For a game that launched only a week ago, the community side of this is already moving. Thousands of clips, streams, and videos have been posted since the pre-launch test, and a contest with real cash on the table tends to find the weird ones fast. If you play, the contest is the cheapest excuse there is to actually record your sessions.
Console players, your turn in 2028
The other announcement buried in the launch is the one that matters if you do not play on PC. WARDOGS is coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox in 2028. Wishlists opened at 11am BST on launch day, and both store pages are live: the PlayStation 5 page and the Xbox page. A 100-player FPS with local voice and destructible everything is a demanding ask for a controller experience, so the studio is taking its time. That is the right call, and it also means the PC Early Access period is where the game will actually be shaped.
The launch trailer leans into that idea. "PLAY LIKE YOU USED TO" is a deliberate nod to Halo 3's "Believe" trailer, and it is aiming at the era when multiplayer was the social event, not the second thing you checked. Whether the three-team local voice design delivers that feeling in a full release is the question the next year or two will answer. What we know right now is that nearly half a million people tried the beta, 245,118 of them were in the final test at once, and the game is out. The official WARDOGS website and the Steam page are where the full details live, and the clip contest is already running. If the test numbers are any guide, the first weekend of Early Access is going to be loud.
