WARDOGS Season 2: Bulkhead Admits ‘We F***ed Up’, Lists Fixes

WARDOGS developer Bulkhead admitted on Wednesday that the studio “fed up” the launch of WARDOGS Season 2, with CEO Joe Brammer walking players through two of the community’s biggest complaints and the fixes already in flight. “We were wrong, we fed up,” Brammer said in a video and developer post following Season 2’s rocky debut. The Bulkhead CEO also confirmed a midseason 0.25 update is on the way that will add a new “limited mode servers” option to WARDOGS, alongside ongoing tweaks to Blue Team balance and the Driver progression track.

Bulkhead is the UK studio behind the WARDOGS franchise; WARDOGS is the studio’s 50v50 milsim-adjacent shooter that exploded after a full launch in September 2026, hitting a 336,679-player Steam peak in the weeks since (per Pixel Herald’s WARDOGS player data). Current 24-hour peaks around 298,360 show Season 2 hasn’t killed the momentum, even as community sentiment soured.

The first issue was the Blue Team cash and XP bonus Bulkhead added to “polish Lonestar’s tarnished reputation.” The boost was supposed to last about a week. Instead, the most dedicated players flocked to Blue, and the previously weakest team started winning “by far the most.” The bonus was 5% extra cash and 2.5% extra XP, “not a huge boost, but it was enough to swing the balance for the most try-hard players,” Brammer said. It has already been removed in a hotfix.

“We should have just stuck to our guns with that, really, but here we are — we tried, it didn’t work, this is us holding our hands up,” Brammer said. Blue Team is one of two sides in WARDOGS matches; the bonus was meant to coax players off Red.

The second issue was a Driver progression exploit that let players farm XP by setting a nearby FOB and making rapid trips back and forth. The exploit let Drivers grab tanks extremely quickly, which made it look like anyone on that track was racing ahead of the curve. A backend fix is on the way that will curb the exploit and slow Driver progression overall. Players who used the trick “extremely obtusely” will get 24-hour bans. Brammer estimates that affects “less than a thousand people” out of the hundreds of thousands who have logged in since Season 2 launched.

The bigger structural fix is “limited mode servers,” slated for the WARDOGS update 0.25 midseason. The new mode will replace low-level servers with a ruleset that caps out level-four armor, power weapons, and vehicles like tanks and artillery. The goal is to capture the early-to-midgame experience for players who prefer that loop. “All that stuff is going to be capped out of the game so you can continue to play level-two armor, have fun around that space,” Brammer said. UX Director Howard Philpott added one reassurance for fans of WARDOGS’s signature soundtrack: “Just in case anyone’s concerned, that Eiffel 65 music tape is staying in the game.”

What it means for WARDOGS right now

WARDOGS hit its highest Steam player peak yet shortly after launch, with 336,679 concurrent players tracked by Pixel Herald, and current 24-hour peaks around 298,360. The launch has clearly strained the early-access process: IGN’s write-up of Brammer’s apology notes that the studio is “scrambling to keep up” with the game’s sales success and has already had to hold back features to make sure WARDOGS will run on Xbox Series S when it finally hits consoles in 2028 (see our Squad PS5/Xbox coverage on the tactical-shooter console race).

Brammer’s apology is the second major live-service pullback in two weeks, after Jagex cancelled RuneScape Reignited seven weeks before its planned launch. Both are live-service games that hit visible problems before a major reset, and both ended with named studio leaders publicly owning the mistakes rather than quietly rolling back changes.

Our read: WARDOGS Season 2’s launch issues are exactly what the live-service cycle is supposed to catch and fix, and Bulkhead’s “we f***ed up” video with a named CEO, a named bug, a same-week hotfix, and a named midseason update is the playbook players want from a live-service dev. The Blue Team bonus was a self-inflicted balance problem; the Driver exploit was an oversight with a ban tier for the worst offenders; limited mode servers is the most interesting longer-term fix because it acknowledges not every player wants high-end vehicles. If 0.25 lands with those three pieces plus the rain system that already shipped, WARDOGS Season 2 will probably be remembered more for the apology than the problems.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report