As Wardogs Season 3 looms, Bulkhead claims to have built ‘one of the world’s most sophisticated anti-cheat systems’, assisted by ‘machine learning and AI’

Wardogs enjoyed an incredible launch, but Season 2 was very much Bulkhead’s ‘difficult second album’ phase of live service development. A cash-incentive experiment to rebalance the game’s weaker blue team was dropped just one day it went live, while the studio’s broader attempt to address player concerns ended up sucking a lot of the fun out of the military FPS.

Now, with Season 3 on the horizon, Bulkhead has addressed the mistakes the studio made with Season 2 and discussed how the new season will address them. It’s a tale that involves a new map, new modes, new upgrade paths, and an AI-powered anticheat.

The Road to Season 3 video kicks off with a mea culpa from Bulkhead. “Whilst learning to adapt to running a live service, we decided with good intent to try to respond to negative reviews with actions rather than words,” Howard Philpott, Bulkhead’s UI/UX director, says in the video. “When the patch notes dropped, on paper the reaction was great. But in reality, when the season went live, the sentiment went quickly downhill.

Bulkhead believes the changes it made were too aggressive, while the studio was too easily swayed by the whims of vocal players and its own worries about the inevitable post-launch player dropoff. Henceforth, Bulkhead intends to stick to its guns. “No matter how incredible the launch was for us and players, both we, the developers and you as players must hold strong and not speedrun fixes to appease the loudest voices.”

With that said, Season 3 brings several hopefully more considered changes to Wardogs. First up is a new map called Sabatulo. With a heavier focus on urban environments than existing Wardogs battlegrounds, Sabatulo is designed to facilitate more close-quarters fights than other maps, giving you more reason to equip shorter-range weaponry.

Arguably more significant, however, is multi-track unlocks. Rather than locking every unlock behind a specific role, Bulkhead has adjusted progression so that any item that might feasibly be used by a role can be unlocked by playing it. This is something of a stopgap solution, as Bulkhead works on a bigger rework to progression coming in 2027. But it should mean players no longer have to grind roles they don’t want to play to get the items they need.

Alongside these progression tweaks, Season 3 introduces a new “Limited” mode, which removes high-tier weapons, armour, vehicles etc from the roster. The idea is to level the playing field so that more casual players can enjoy the game without getting constantly murked by fully kitted out super-soldiers. It’s a sensible option to include, and I’ll be intrigued to see how popular it proves.

Finally, Season 3 heralds the arrival of what Bulkhead claims to be “one of the world’s most sophisticated anti-cheat systems”, which the studio has produced by “analysing 187 million hours of gameplay with the assistance of machine learning and AI”. Apparently, the system went live when the video was published, banning a whopping 185,000 accounts as it did so.

Apparently, Bulkhead planned to launch this system later in Wardogs’ life, but the game’s sheer popularity has given them the data they require to implement it much earlier. “In order for us to train our models, we needed to let cheaters go through their journey of refining and tuning their cheats so we could see them evolve,” says Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer. “This method has given us time to analyse and build consistent case reports confirming cheaters who were attempting to hide in the dark.”

To touch upon the AI element, obviously it’s a loaded term nowadays (and, usually, rightly so) but this kind of targeted, homebrew machine learning is not necessarily the same flavour of AI as the multipurpose LLMs that are ruining everything from emails to greetings cards. Brammer says that the system won’t eliminate cheaters completely, and that cheating will always be a problem “unless governments start criminalising cheat development”—which is a very Brammer thing to say. But the studio seems confident that the system will help produce a better play experience when Season 3 arrives on November 12.