WARDOGS Season 3 launches November 12 with new urban map Sabatulo

BULKHEAD has dated the next reset of WARDOGS: Season 03 "drops November 12th", the studio wrote in its Steam post "WARDOGS | Road to Season 3" on November 6, 2026. The headline addition is a new map, Sabatulo, which the developer says brings "urban warfare and close quarters combat" to the Early Access shooter.

What Season 3 brings

The post accompanies a devlog in which the studio recaps "where we went wrong with Season 02" and promises "No social experiments. No reactivity." Besides the new map, BULKHEAD announces longer seasons and a commitment to building the best version of the game on the road to 1.0. The devlog also covers cheating and exploiting and what the team is doing about it going into Season 03. Full details follow in a Season 03 Patch Notes Preview early next week.

PCGamesN adds that Season 3 comes with a fresh economy reset and will introduce limited or "primitive" servers meant to help "replicate the low-to-mid game". Executive Producer Joe Brammer told the site: "We've got to slow down. We can't do monthly seasons." He suggested three-month refreshes with a smaller update instead.

How Season 2 went wrong

Season 2 went live as Update 0.2.0 on October 15. According to GameSpot, it cut the XP needed for level 10 by 29%, for level 15 by 50% and for level 20 by 55%. The developer also ran what it called a "social experiment" on faction win rates, which GameSpot described as bribing players to pick a team they would not otherwise choose.

The faster progression backfired. DualShockers reports that in an October 17 statement BULKHEAD admitted it "sped up progression deliberately". PCGamesN quoted the studio saying some players were "reaching end-game gear like tier-four armor and MBTs within days". Bulkhead ruled out a "knee-jerk reset" and instead announced, still in Season 2's first weekend, that Season 3 would come "significantly forward". Creative Director Tim Nightingale later said that move "put a sour taste in people's mouths." Because Season 2 ended up shorter, Bulkhead plans to keep gold skins available longer. The Season 3 devlog itself was pushed back a week, with Community Manager Brian 'L0ssy' McCrann saying the team was "making some big moves".

Cheating is a sensitive topic beyond this season: game director Howard Philpott told PCGamesN that the studio's zero-tolerance anti-cheat stance quickly "turned into banning our legitimate alpha testers" at launch.

On Steam, reviews are arriving far faster than before: 11,710 in the last 48 hours, about 5,855 a day against 1,087 a day earlier, and 96% of them positive. The overall rating still stands at Mixed, 67% of 165,631 reviews. Late on November 6 the game had 76,280 players, a daily peak of 91,651 and rank 11 on Steam's most-played chart. In the Steam forum, players welcomed a ban wave against cheaters and gold farmers and called the new map promising; one argued most banned accounts had stopped playing anyway, and another was not convinced by the changes to unlocks.

WARDOGS is a tactical 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.

For newcomers and lapsed players, November 12 is the natural entry point, since the economy reset puts everyone back at the start. The game costs $39.99 with no discount and is still in Early Access, released on September 10, 2026. Waiting for the patch notes preview early next week will show how unlocks and anti-cheat actually change.