WARDOGS progression guide: cash, role tracks and what to buy first
BULKHEAD rewrote the XP curve and vendor prices the day before launch, so here is what to spend your first $10,000 on and which track to level.
WARDOGS, the 100-player tactical shooter from British studio BULKHEAD, entered Steam Early Access on 10 September 2026 at $39.99 and went straight into the top ten most-played games on the platform. BULKHEAD announced 1.25 million copies sold the following day, and Steam's public player-count API showed roughly 364,000 people in the game on 11 September. It is also a shooter that rewrote its own progression maths the day before launch, so a good deal of beta-era advice is already out of date.
This guide covers the parts that decide whether your first ten hours feel productive rather than expensive: how a match is scored, how the persistent cash economy works, which role track pays off soonest, and what the Season 1 changelog did to the experience curve. Every number below comes from BULKHEAD's own patch notes, store page and website.
How a match is won
WARDOGS runs a single core mode built on a King of the Hill idea. Three teams share a lobby of up to 100 players and fight over a randomised 2x2km Control Zone placed somewhere inside a 256km² map. Whichever team has the most players standing inside the zone earns points, and the first team to reach 100 points wins the match. The zone moves from match to match, which is why no two rounds open the same way.
That scoring rule matters more than your kill-to-death ratio. Presence inside the zone is the only thing that scores, so a squad that drives four bodies onto the objective is worth more than a sniper holding a ridge 800 metres out. The same logic drives your income: BULKHEAD pays cash for reviving squadmates, transporting friendlies to the zone and holding the objective, and the Hot Zone pays double cash while it is active.
- Released: 10 September 2026, Steam Early Access, Windows only
- Price: $39.99, and BULKHEAD says the price will rise closer to full release
- Consoles: PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2028
- Early Access length: BULKHEAD expects around one to two years
- Minimum spec: Windows 10, Core i5 8600 or Ryzen 5 3500, 16GB RAM, GTX 1660 or RX 590, 50GB storage
Your first $10,000
Every account starts with $10,000, and that balance persists from match to match. Each life you buy a loadout from scratch, so the money is a running account rather than a per-round budget. Dying with an expensive kit equipped is a real loss, and buying a vehicle you cannot protect is the fastest way for a new player to go broke.
The practical opening play is to spend small and bank the difference. Take a basic rifle kit, stay attached to a squad, and earn on support actions rather than kills: revives, ferrying players to the objective and time on the zone all pay. Once your balance is clear of $30,000 you can start taking real risks with vehicles and optics, because you can afford to lose one.
Season 1 also moved several vendor and role prices, and the direction of travel is upward for the tools that let one player shape the map. Current prices worth memorising before you click buy:
- Forward Operating Base: raised from $2,500 to $7,500
- Large Hammer (vendor): raised from $1,600 to $2,400, and to $75,000 on the Support track
- Artillery Tank: raised from $400,000 to $500,000
- Little Bird with miniguns: raised from $25,000 to $50,000
- Z20 Lakota and the URAL: both cut from $50,000 to $35,000
- Dune Buggy: cut from $35,000 to $25,000
The cheap transport helicopter and truck getting cheaper while the attack helicopter and the artillery tank got dearer is a deliberate nudge. Logistics is the intended entry point, and it is also the safest place to earn.
Role tracks: pick Driver first
Progression is split across separate tracks rather than one account level. The Season 1 changelog names six of them: Career, Medic, Support, Recon, Pilot and Driver, each with its own unlock order, alongside a Vendor list you can buy from directly. Season 1 reordered several of these, and the clearest winner for a new player is Driver.
The Driver track now front-loads almost everything useful. The URAL truck dropped to level 3, the Kodiak Assault to level 6, the Dune Buggy to level 8 and the Large Supply Crate to level 16. The covered URAL moved from level 30 to 18 and the URAL Attack from 40 to 25. Driving bodies and supplies to the Control Zone is both the cheapest way to play and the fastest track to level, which is a rare overlap in a game like this.
The prestige items went the other way. The Heavy Tank was moved off the Career track entirely and now sits at Driver level 35, and the Artillery Tank was pushed from Career level 55 to Career level 90. If you bought WARDOGS to shell a town from six kilometres away, that is a long-term project and not a week-one one.
“Looking at the data we have decided to slow levels down around 10 to 20, and flatten the curve from 35 onward.”BULKHEAD, developer of WARDOGS, Season 1 changelog, 9 September 2026
The Season 1 XP curve, in numbers
BULKHEAD's pre-launch Season 1 changelog replaced a curve tuned for weekend beta tests with one tuned for a season. Levels below 6 are unchanged, the squeeze starts at 10 and the curve flattens again from 35 onward:
- Level 10: 25,000 XP to 35,000 XP, 40% slower
- Level 15: 54,750 XP to 110,000 XP, roughly 101% slower
- Level 20: 111,500 XP to 250,000 XP, roughly 124% slower
- Level 25: 192,000 XP to 325,000 XP, roughly 69% slower
- Level 50: 838,000 XP to 1,000,000 XP, roughly 19% slower
BULKHEAD's own benchmark is that a median player at 20 to 25 hours should sit around level 20. Two XP events were also trimmed: a player kill from an air vehicle dropped from 300 XP to 250 XP, and selling a supply crate item under $75 fell from 25 XP to 1 XP, closing a low-value farming loop. Each season is planned to ship a different XP curve and a different item order, so treat any unlock order you read as a Season 1 snapshot.
Settings and launch-week problems
The same changelog fixed several things worth checking in your options menu. DLSS Frame Generation can now be switched off without restarting the game, and two crash paths in the frame generation pipeline were fixed, so turning it off is a reasonable first move if you are crashing. Shadow quality is now clamped to Low on high benchmark scores instead of being disabled outright, and reduced shadow cache refreshes cut the hitch you used to get when taking control of a character. Voice chat also had a pass: stale channel rejoins, push-to-talk targeting and re-login now recover properly after a failed join.
Server access was the bigger launch-week story. BULKHEAD shipped Launch Stability Hotfix #1 on 10 September to address players being unable to join servers, unexpected kicks mid-match and extended login queues, then let players back in through the queue in controlled batches. If you are still queuing, that is the system working as intended rather than a fault at your end. For cheating, BULKHEAD's stated advice is to use the in-game report function on official servers, or play on community-hosted servers where admins can ban directly.
What is still missing
This is an Early Access build and BULKHEAD has been blunt about what is not in it. The studio has committed to no monetisation during Early Access beyond an optional Supporter Edition, and says in-game cash and gold bars will never be directly purchasable. The deeper metagame, including the Black Market and Vault, is designed but still being built, with fighter jets, more maps and extra objective variations planned. Details sit on the Steam store page and Team17 game page.
WARDOGS. PLAY LIKE YOU USED TO. COMING TO CONSOLES IN 2028. RELEASING ON STEAM EARLY ACCESS TODAY.
— WARDOGS (@WARDOGS) on X
Official links
Sam writes about small studios and the games they ship against the odds, and turns the hardest parts of them into guides that get to the point.
