Why WARDOGS could be the next big FPS and why your PC needs to be ready
There’s a particular kind of hunger in the FPS community right now. Not for another hero shooter, not for a battle royale with a fresh coat of paint, but for
something that actually feels like all-out war. Big maps. Proper combined arms. Roles that matter. The kind of game where flying a helicopter to drop troops into a control zone has weight behind it.
WARDOGS, from Derby-based indie studio Bulkhead and publisher Team17, might just be it. Hitting Steam Early Access on 10 September 2026, the game has seen a crazy amount of hype, reaching 1 million wishlists on Steam already and enough pre-orders to make beta testing a breeze! If that’s anything to go by, then WARDOGS might end up giving the likes of Battlefield a run for their money.
Who are Bulkhead?
If you’ve been in PC gaming circles for a while, Bulkhead won’t be a new name. Founded in 2015, they’re the studio behind Battalion 1944, a Kickstarter-backed WWII shooter that hit 250,000 sales and clocked a million hours watched on Twitch in its first week on Steam.
They’re not a big studio. They’re not propped up by a publisher with infinite resources. They’re a small independent UK team who have consistently made games for a specific, underserved audience: players who remember when multiplayer shooters had actual depth. WARDOGS is their biggest swing yet.
What actually is WARDOGS?
WARDOGS is a tactical all-out warfare FPS where up to 100 players are split across three teams in a large-scale militaristic sandbox. Combining grounded
infantry gunplay with vehicle combat and building and destruction mechanics, players fight to claim the 2 km x 2 km control zone. It’s not a battle royale or an
extraction shooter; Bulkhead has been very clear on that. This is more like “King of the Hill” amped up to 11. The team with the most players inside the zone earns points every 30 seconds, or double points by entering the “hot zone,” and the first to 100 points wins. It’s a classic premise, but instead of cramming everyone into a small map, it throws you into a 16 km x 16 km battlefield that forces teams to consider every decision they make, adding tactics and realism to a genre that’s long needed change.
Additionally, the economy really sets WARDOGS apart. Every player starts with $10,000 to spend, which goes toward custom loadouts of weapons, gear, utilities, and vehicles. Now, quite a few sites are claiming that this is every game, but that’s incorrect. You start with $10,000. Then, you earn money per kill. You earn money for dropping troops from a helicopter and keeping them alive. Support, medic, recon, engineer – every role feeds back into the economy, so every role is actually worth playing, rewarding coordination without having to spell it out in a tutorial.
Why we're ready for this game
The large-scale military FPS space has needed something fresh for years. Battlefield has had a rough run, and the community knows it. Battlefield 2042
launched in a state that burnt a lot of goodwill, and the series has been rebuilding trust ever since. Squad and Arma serve a dedicated crowd but have always had a steep entry point. Getting useful in either game requires a serious time investment that puts off everyone except the most committed. Hell Let Loose found its audience, but it’s slow and deliberate by design, which isn’t what everyone is looking for.
The gap, then, is real. Something that brings the scale and the chaos of a proper military sandbox without the forty-hour apprenticeship. And King of the Hill, for all its simplicity as a mode, has a proven track record. Arma 3’s community-made KotH mod has been running continuously for over a decade. Players keep coming back to it because the format creates natural tension, constant decision-making, and a reason for every role to exist. Bulkhead hasn’t reinvented anything here. They’ve taken a format with demonstrated staying power and built an entire game around it properly, with the production values and the mechanical depth to back it up.
Now add in the fact that Bulkhead brought in aerospace engineers to build realistic helicopter flight models and ballistics simulations. Weapons have bullet drop and damage falloff over distance. We spoke to one beta tester who even described it as “like if Arma 3 and Battlefield had a baby.” Now, that’s obviously
referring to Battlefield’s past, not the latest in the line, I hope, but high praise nonetheless. The tactical depth of Arma without the wall of menus, wrapped in the moment-to-moment readability of Battlefield. With that level of investment from a studio this size, is it any surprise that WARDOGS has been outrageously popular even before hitting Early Access?
The beta, the community, and why Bulkhead's approach matters
Here’s where it gets interesting, because WARDOGS has done something that’s become genuinely rare in this genre: it’s been honest. Bulkhead released a pre-order trailer titled ’10 Reasons NOT to Buy WARDOGS.’ Not a highlights reel. Not a cinematic. A list of reasons you might want to keep your money. They followed that up with an explicit promise of full refunds for anyone unhappy after playing the closed beta. In a genre that has produced some of the most high-profile disappointment launches in recent memory, that kind of transparency lands differently. It’s a studio that believes in what it’s built enough to let it speak for itself.
The closed beta went out to pre-order buyers from 22 August, and the reaction has been largely positive. The consensus from players who’ve been through it
lines up with what you’d hope: the core loop works, the economy creates genuine incentive across every role, and the scale holds up in ways that matter. That’s not nothing for a 100-player combined-arms game from an independent studio.
It’s also worth knowing that WARDOGS uses a stepped pricing model. The Early Access price is the lowest it will ever be. When the game hits 1.0, the price goes up. So beyond the question of whether the game is worth playing right now, there’s a straightforward financial argument for getting in early if you’re planning to play it at all.
PC first, PC only
One thing that doesn’t get enough attention in the coverage so far: WARDOGS is a PC exclusive. No console versions have been announced, and given the design of the game, that feels deliberate.
Full HOTAS support is built in from the start. That’s not a feature you bolt on for a console port; it’s a sign that this is a game made for the PC players, sim
enthusiasts, and the crowd who already split time between DCS, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Arma and have been looking for something with a bit more
moment-to-moment action. WARDOGS sits in an interesting position for that audience, as it’s accessible enough for players who’ve never touched a flight sim
but deep enough to reward the ones who have.
One thing worth flagging for Linux users and Steam Deck or Steam machine owners: WARDOGS uses Easy Anti-Cheat at the kernel level. That rules out Linux
compatibility for now, and Valve hasn’t published a specific Steam Deck compatibility statement. If you’re running Linux as your primary OS, this one’s a problem, but it’s worth keeping an eye out as the game develops.
What does your PC need to run it?
Here’s where it gets practical. The official specs are reasonable given what the game is doing, but there are a couple of things worth knowing before you commit.
RAM is the same across both tiers at 16GB, so there’s no headroom argument for going higher here, not that extra RAM ever hurt anyone. However, the GPU jump from minimum to recommended is steep. A GTX 1660 to RTX 3070 is not a small gap, and that’s typical of a game where the simulation load is doing the heavy lifting rather than the rendering. A hundred networked players fighting over a 4 km² square with vehicles and destructible environments is a lot for a CPU to handle, and the recommended processor jump from an i5-8600 to an i7-12700K reflects that.
It’s also worth understanding what “minimum” actually means in a game like this. In a standard shooter, running minimum settings means slightly worse textures. In WARDOGS, minimum settings mean upscaled 1080p, while 100 players, multiple vehicles, and active destruction systems are all being simulated at once. The floor is higher than it looks on paper, and you’ll feel it in the moments that matter most: big pushes on the control zone, contested hot zones, and helicopter runs into a live point. That’s exactly when a rig running at the margins will start to show it.
The CPU situation is worth particular attention if you’re weighing up an upgrade. WARDOGS is built around a simulation load that most modern shooters don’t come near. Networked physics, vehicle handling, destruction, and 100-player positional data all hit the processor first. The recommended jump from an i5-8600 to an i7-12700K is steeper than the GPU gap suggests, which tells you where Bulkhead expects the real bottleneck to be. If your CPU is ageing but your GPU is solid, WARDOGS is one of the stronger arguments for prioritising a platform upgrade over a graphics card swap.
It’s important to remember as well that these are pre-Early Access figures for a game that will keep being tuned throughout development, so it’s worth rechecking specs closer to any hardware decision, particularly once full launch player counts start putting real pressure on servers.
If you’re on a W2F AMD build with an RX 9060 or above, you’re comfortably sitting in recommended territory with room to grow if the need arises. The FOUNDRY in particular, running the Ryzen 5 8400F on AM5 with the RX 9060 XT, sits well above the recommended bar and gives you real headroom for the game to grow into. If you’ve been sitting on an upgrade decision, WARDOGS is exactly the kind of game that makes the case for you.
What's on the roadmap?
Early Access means it’s not finished, and Bulkhead has been upfront about that. The studio expects the Early Access period to last roughly one to two years, and the roadmap is substantial: more maps, more weapons, more vehicles, expanded progression systems, and a seasonal metagame are all confirmed as part of the plan. The core 100-player experience is there from day one, which is more than most Early Access launches can say, but the intention is clearly to build the game alongside its community rather than ship it complete.
That community-shaped development model is genuinely Bulkhead’s strongest suit. Battalion 1944 was built around player feedback from its Kickstarter backers onwards. WARDOGS looks set to follow the same pattern, and given that the core loop already holds up in beta, the foundation is there to build on.
The big picture
WARDOGS isn’t just a game worth watching. It’s a marker of something shifting in the industry. The biggest military FPS titles of the last decade have come from studios with hundreds of developers and marketing budgets that dwarf Bulkhead’s entire operation. Most of them have stumbled. Meanwhile a team out
of Derby, best known for a Kickstarter WWII shooter, has built something that’s generated more genuine pre-launch excitement than anything in the genre for
years.
That matters for PC gaming specifically. WARDOGS being a PC exclusive isn’t a limitation; it’s a statement. The sim community, the Arma veterans, the players who have been quietly waiting for something to fill the gap that Battlefield left: they all live on PC. Bulkhead knows exactly who it’s making this for, and it’s made every design decision accordingly, from HOTAS support to the economy system to the King of the Hill format that has kept Arma 3 servers running for over a decade.
Whether WARDOGS becomes the next big FPS or a solid Early Access title that finds its crowd and stays there, it represents exactly the kind of game the PC
platform does best: ambitious, community-driven, and built around the idea that players are capable of handling depth.
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Author – Grace Wilkinson
Grace is an English Literature and Creative Writing graduate with a passion for storytelling and video games.