WARDOGS, explained: what this 100-player three-team shooter actually is

WARDOGS got revealed yesterday over at Team17, and the pitch is short enough to repeat from memory: a "Tactical All Out Warfare" FPS that is deliberately not a battle royale and not an extraction shooter.

That's the part that made me look twice. Pretty much every large-scale shooter of the last few years ended up as one of those two things, so a studio saying "neither" out loud is already interesting.

Here's what we know so far.

Three teams, not two

100 players, split across three rival teams. Not 100 individuals, not fifty duos. Three organized factions fighting over the same piece of ground at the same time.

Three-sided fights behave nothing like two-sided fights. Alliances of convenience become possible. When team A and team B grind each other down on the objective, team C gets to pick the moment, or just not show up at all.

BULKHEAD clearly knows this, because WARDOGS is inspired by the three-way "King of the Hill" mod for Arma 3, and they're developing it together with the original mod creators, Sa-Matra. That lineage is the strongest signal in the whole announcement for me. King of the Hill ran for years, and it ran on stories that a shrinking circle on a map never produces.

The Control Zone sits inside a much bigger map

Every match has a central high-stakes Control Zone, roughly 2x2 km. That zone sits inside a map of 256 square kilometers.

That ratio is the design in one number. The Control Zone is where the fight concentrates. The rest of the map is where you stage, travel, and decide how much you're willing to risk on the way in. If getting there takes time, then getting there is a decision, and the ambush on the road matters as much as the fight at the objective.

Where you're fighting

Derelict industrial mountains in Eastern Europe, and the terrain is destructible.

Destruction is listed right next to construction, which I think matters more than "destructible" on its own. It means the map changes over a match instead of just getting chewed up. The pillars they list are tactical gunplay, combined-arms combat, construction, destruction, large-scale team play and vehicles.

Nothing on that list says battle royale. Nothing says extraction either, and that one is worth saying twice, because a lot of people see "big map plus cash" and assume extraction shooter.

Who's making it

BULKHEAD, a studio from Derby in the UK, founded in 2015. You might know them from The Turing Test and Battalion 1944.

Publisher is Team17, founded 1990, part of everplay Group plc, also home to Hell Let Loose and Worms. If you've played Hell Let Loose you know Team17 can support this kind of audience, and a large-scale combined-arms shooter is a sensible fit for them.

Cash is the thing to watch

"Cash is earned and cash is king."

Cash isn't just a score here. It decides what risks you can take, what gear and vehicles you can afford, and how much you stand to lose. Every death, every vehicle purchase, every trip across the map lands on your account balance.

The loop they describe: take the Control Zone, secure cash, survive long enough to bank it.

I think that's the most under-discussed part of the reveal, so it's getting its own post later.

One more thing: everyone can hear you

Local voice chat is audible across all three teams. Your enemies hear you, you hear them.

Negotiating, bluffing, and giving away your position by complaining about it are all on the table. Put that next to three factions and you get the kind of encounters no scripted system produces.

If that sounds like your thing, the official site, the Steam page and the Discord are where it's happening.

I'll be following this one closely. For once, not a battle royale or another extraction shooter.

• Ted