WARDOGS Season 3 arrives November 12 with new map Sabatulo

WARDOGS gets its third season on November 12. Developer Bulkhead confirmed the date in its official Steam post "WARDOGS | Road to Season 3" on November 6, which announces a new map called Sabatulo, longer seasons and steps against cheating and exploiting.

What Season 3 brings

According to the post, Sabatulo "brings urban warfare and close quarters combat" to the game. The accompanying devlog recaps where the team went wrong with Season 02 and frames Season 3 as a steadier course on the road to version 1.0: "No social experiments. No reactivity." A Season 03 patch notes preview is due early next week.

PCGamesN reports that Season 3 comes with a fresh economy reset and limited servers that remove power weapons and vehicles. In an earlier PCGamesN piece, those servers are described as a way for players to "choose not to play with power weapons". The outlet also reports that Bulkhead plans to extend the availability of gold skins because Season 2 ran shorter than planned, and that the studio delayed its Season 3 preview video.

A rough Season 2

The new season follows a troubled one. PC Gamer reported that one day into Season 2 the studio dropped the Blue team bonus, with Brammer saying "We were wrong." DualShockers reports the seasonal wipe had no real effect because many players had already reached Tier 4 armor and main battle tanks. PCGamesN writes that rapid leveling speeds erased the economy wipe too quickly and that the team admits it made "a huge mistake". Brammer told the outlet: "We've got to slow down. We can't do monthly seasons."

Kotaku, which calls Brammer the studio boss, reports that the game hit well over 400,000 concurrent players in its first few days and still reached over 100,000 a day. Four days ago it also counted about 40,000 recent reviews averaging "Mixed" with only 51 percent positive. Kotaku quotes Brammer telling players they are free to stay away in December, because "we need to detox".

The review picture is in motion. The Steam store currently rates the last 30 days as Mixed, with 67% of 58,892 reviews positive; overall, 70% of 184,230 reviews are positive, which Steam labels Mostly Positive. In our snapshots, 29,503 new reviews came in over 42 hours, about 16.7 times the earlier pace, and 97% of them are positive. In Steam reviews, some players say banned cheaters and gold farmers are review-bombing the game and that they are posting to counter it. In the Steam forum, players discuss a ban wave: some welcome it, others say they were banned unfairly.

On November 8 at 05:41 UTC, 63,348 people were playing, rank 20 on Steam's most-played chart, after a peak of 97,553 that day.

WARDOGS is an Early Access FPS in which one hundred players split across three teams fight over a control zone on a destructible battlefield. It shares the FPS, Military and Tactical tags with Squad, Insurgency: Sandstorm and BattleBit Remastered.

The game costs $39.99 with no discount. With an economy reset arriving on November 12, Season 3 is the obvious point to start or return, but the patch notes preview early next week is worth reading first. Expect a quieter December, going by Brammer's comments to Kotaku.