Wardogs interview: this is a game for 'dad gamers'

"We're making the game that we want to play"

One of the most anticipated games of the year for shooter fans is Wardogs, a multiplayer FPS in development at Bulkhead. Self-described as "tactical all-out warfare," it's being marketed as more hardcore than Battlefield and Call of Duty, but not quite as realistic or unforgiving as Escape From Tarkov or Hell Let Loose.

So far, there's a lot for Wardogs to boast about: 100-player matches, destructible environments, a cash-based metagame, skills that level up RuneScape-style by performing those actions, base-building, a vast array of weapons and vehicles, the list goes on. The idea of "playing your way" runs through everything about Wardogs, because, as Bulkhead co-founder and CEO Joe Brammer told me during a remote interview, "you can't not help your team."

"One of the best mechanics in Wardogs is what we call 'selfish teamwork'," Brammer explained. "Let's say you just want to make [in-game] cash. The way you do that is by getting some kills, or maybe you snipe, you hang out on the edge of the zone and you kill a few red and green players on the opposition teams. Obviously, you're getting kills, so you're taking away from the other teams' pool of players, but you're also in the zone contributing [to the objective]."

He followed that example up with an anecdote about how during internal playtests, the Bulkhead operations team joined in, mostly women in their twenties who are not gamers in the slightest. "But we've made them become gamers," he said. "If you work here, you're a gamer."

"When they're playtesting, they think they're actually in a war. They think they're going to die, they're not enjoying that. They started to understand the zone, but they're so afraid of dying that they sit inside a building,” he explained. “One of them would be like 'you watch the window, you watch the door,' and they wouldn't move. But because it matters how many people you have in the control zone, whoever had the operations team on their side was winning. There were five people just sitting there, still contributing to the team effort."

One recurring theme throughout our chat was how the team is building the exact kind of game they want to play. Bulkhead's first game, Battalion 1944, was an arena shooter in the same vein as Counter-Strike and Valorant, where quick reflexes and fast-paced gameplay were king. Back then, Brammer and his friends — those he founded Bulkhead with — could hang with the best of the bunch. But these days? "I haven't got time to be as good as the younger crowd now," he explained, before requesting the phrase "younger crowd" be omitted from the interview. Sorry, Joe; it was on the record.

"It didn't have to be a gap in the market for us [to develop Wardogs]; it just had to be something that we thought was cool. And what we knew from Battalion 1944 was, when we make games that we want to play in our evenings, we make a better game because of it. I'm 33 now; I think I was 25 when we started Battalion. I have a two-year-old now, so we're all kind of becoming dad gamers. I actually think I'm the youngest one in our group, but we're all kind of drifting into that space, albeit not on purpose."

Wardogs currently has a closed pre-alpha playtest happening, and the game will be released in early access later this year.