WARDOGS has created somehow the most cooperative team based experience I can think of in any sort of recent memory. The setup is simple: reward players for playing. The high killers aren’t the only ones that deserve to get stuff. In a war, the people out of sight can be crucial to the success of the team almost just as much as the people out there on the front lines. The spawn point is 3km from the actual play area. How do you solve that problem to make it less daunting? You incentivize people to play transport. Helicopter pilots are the life blood of the team’s efficiency. Doing runs back and forth from spawn to play area, the helicopter pilots are the only reason the team is doing anything, really. So they get paid. Every person that deploys and lands without dying gives you money nearly equivalent to getting a single kill. Every player that you dropped off that gets a kill? Money in your pocket too; WARDOGS knows they wouldn’t be out there getting those kills if you hadn’t done your part to drop them off. This is the ethos set in place of understanding across the entire landscape of WARDOGS: a team is nothing without every part.
But I haven’t even gotten into what the actual game is yet. So… what is WARDOGS? It’s a 100 player massively multiplayer game with three teams of 33 (with one being 34? I didn’t quite understand the 100 player limit, but it seemed fine in action.) who are each fighting to control a zone in the center of the map. The maps in WARDOGS are huge, easily 8km edge to edge, but the meat of the game takes place in the center. Team spawns are on the outer edges, but the ~3km of space between the spawn and the control zone are only seemingly there for the sake of logistics and coordination. Teams work together to simply keep the highest number of players in the control zone, with the game rewarding one point to whatever team has the most every 30 seconds or so. Inside the control zone, there is a smaller moving “hot zone” that counts every player inside as two people toward their team’s occupancy. Every player has a pool of money they can use to purchase hardware for their team to push for the win, and there is no shortage of opportunities to earn said money.
As I mentioned above, WARDOGS is not afraid to reward everyone for everything they do. If you are not great at FPS games, you can still progress here just as quickly as the top dog in a match with a 10.0 K/D. Transport, logistics, recon, support, healing; all these things give just as much, if not more money than the average player pushing to get kills in the zone. I spent my time in the beta this weekend trying to run the gamut and get an idea of what it’s like to be any one kind of player. I was surprised to find the success I got out of simply playing helicopter pilot, and honestly, how much fun it was to do so. Zipping quickly, getting a chopper full of people who are all stuck together in a small vehicle for at least 90 seconds, each with their own goals. Getting to coordinate to ensure I fly above exactly where they want to be dropped. Getting low to the ground to avoid being spotted by enemy troops, angling harshly to avoid taking fire as the team jumped out one by one. Having to land in a hot zone because someone forgot to purchase a parachute on spawn (c’mon guy!). It all adds together to create, from my experience, a game that genuinely makes you have to work as a team if you want to win. There’s no carrying here, your group of 33 need to be spread enough among the roles to ensure you’re excelling in all areas.
Which, speaking of spotting, this was another area that made me so much money. It was easy to find myself in first place in the leaderboard with just a pair of binoculars perched atop a tower in the center of the control zone. Marking in WARDOGS works heavily to teeter favor toward your team, working less like Battlefield and more like enabling an advanced UAV in Call of Duty. When someone is marked in WARDOGS, they are visible on your entire team’s map for the next 60 seconds or so. Even after they leave your sight, the spot remains. This means spotters are extremely powerful, and again, the rewards for doing so reflect that power and usefulness. A single mark gives about a quarter of the money you get from an actual kill, but as soon as your team finishes them off, you get the other three-quarters. You contributed to that kill as much as the guy that finished them off, so take your credit by way of dollar bills.
If it isn’t obvious, money is everything and everything is money in WARDOGS. Literally all aspects across the board are littered with the in-game currency. When you go down, you can offer “bribes” to your teammates to convince them to revive you. If you have a super expensive kit, it might make you more willing to draw that bid for your life ever higher to get them over to you asap. Being revived offers you a key to tip your reviver, jumping out of a helicopter offers you the same, and so does any other action a teammate does to assist you. Money flows everywhere, and money is what everyone needs for everything.
Which I haven’t mentioned yet, but also… the money is persistent. Money is not a per-match thing, and joining late does not put you at a disadvantage. Spending money is a gamble that lets you bring more powerful things to the battlefield, but when you lose it, it’s gone forever. So don’t die, or at least, be ready to bribe your revives heavily if (when) you die. But there’s never any worry about having to deploy without enough to defend yourself competently. Despite the fact that every revive means buying an entirely new gear set, there’s one free gun that’s “okay”, but also a full kit of competent equipment barely costs more than a single kill’s money. Not that that matters, given all the other context above about how easy it is to get money, but still- just to showcase the security despite the opportunity for oppression on the side of money blockading your progression. At no point, even in games where I went with literally zero kills, did I feel like I was struggling to keep gaining money. The balance feels great, and it does well to make you stay engaged, in my opinion.
Don’t expect WARDOGS to be a super fast paced shooter. There will be a lot of down time, whether that means literally you being down and begging for a revive, or waiting patiently at home base for a transport helicopter to take you out to the fight. You will be waiting sometimes, and the action is more sporadic via the tension of moving through a large war zone with two other teams that may also be fighting each other at any moment. The whole setup is a delicate balance, and it feels like BULKHEAD knew exactly what they were doing here. It’s a large scale battle rooted in chaos in ways that no other game has done before that I can think of, only really bringing Planetside or MAG to mind as similar experiences in the past. If you like mil-sim games, WARDOGS looks promising. If you like high quality FPS experiences, WARDOGS has it for you. If you just want to be a supporting member in a larger scale operation… guess what? WARDOGS has it for you.
WARDOGS releases September 10 on PC only at a generous $40 price point. I think it’s something to keep an eye on, and if everything goes as well as the beta showcased… maybe we’ll see another huge game take off from this.
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