Wardogs developer Bulkhead has openly admitted that its rough second season “hasn’t gone particularly well,” conceding: “We fed up.” According to a report by Kirk McKeand for IGN, the studio owned up to a bonus experiment that backfired and ended up skewing matches.
The admission came after Season 2 introduced XP and cash bonuses for players willing to play Blue Team, in an attempt to polish Lonestar’s tarnished reputation. The idea quickly backfired as more experienced players boosted their accounts on the struggling side. Normally it takes a while for players to unlock some of the deadliest gear, but the XP and cash boosts saw people kitted out with the best armor and most annoying weapons almost immediately.
“We were wrong, we fed up,” Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer said. “This was an experiment — we thought we’d have this in for about a week.” The bonuses had already been removed in a hotfix.
Wardogs Season 2 Screenshots
The cash and XP rewards saw Blue Team go from the worst performing team to quickly dominating every match, attracting all the best players. The boosts were 5% extra cash and 2.5% extra XP — but that was enough to draw in the most try-hard players in the game.
“The only comment that annoyed me is when people say, ‘They didn’t address the core issues [with Blue Team],’ Brammer said, referring to team spawn placement. “Well, actually, we did rebalance the entire spawn setup for Bakurani, and we did test that out quite a lot and see that the difference had balanced out.
“We should have just stuck to our guns with that, really, but here we are — we tried, it didn’t work, this is us holding our hands up.”
Wardogs is still in Early Access, so these kinds of teething issues are expected as the devs experiment and find the right balance for its 1.0 release. The game exploded in terms of sales, and developers have been scrambling to keep up with its popularity since.
Bulkhead also had to make sure Wardogs works on consoles, where it will eventually land in 1.0. The developer already admitted to having to hold back Wardogs features to make sure it’ll run on Xbox Series S.
The season also brought a new rain system that impacts gameplay, with players needing to really cock their heads to pick up footsteps and visibility for pilots being drastically reduced. As noted by IGN, this is one of the Wardogs Season 2 features shaping how matches play out.
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