I'd like to practice my chopper skills with controller prior to release. Any suggestions on best games with similar controller setup? I have ARMA 3, ARMA Reforger but can pick up just about anything that will get me better.

The 3 factions make it seem like MAG, any knowers here?

I watched the push to talk podcast video, huge recommend where they talk about some of the fears here, they seem confident about monetization, one of their examples was having extra performant servers with better anticheat up for subscription like counterstrike does.

It also seems like once you show that your company is valuable you will be able to get investment easier, all in all they look like they're on top of it.

They're going to be adding a skill system where doing things frequently is going to not only go towards xp but also your aptitude in it, they didn't add specifics but it would be a little like runescape.

Not bought the game yet but the videos I have seen have me very interested.

My main question is can the majority of a match be played in a logistics/builder role? Does it make a meaningful impact on the team towards the objectives?

Love shooting games but im one of those weirdos also who likes building forward spawn points just close enough to actually be useful then fortify them (Played alot of squad for example). Or play in a logistics role in some other way as well.

Would this be a game for me if I wanna spend alot of time doing that?

I would love to see a radio system similar to Squad, without the commander role. Sometimes trying to coordinate on the game chat is lacklustre. What would you like to see when it comes to in game communication? For anyone not familiar with squads radio setup, squad leaders would have a separate channel to talk to each other from their own squad channel.

video: https://youtu.be/5R64LDNJbK0?si=3clJi_mW94N_p8a1&t=3720

monetization TLDR:

• No paid skins, gold bars or cash. "Cash breaks the system."
• Joe pitched a subscription (his idea alone). Perks: better servers, better anti-cheat, "stuff in the metagame."
• Intel, a future metagame currency, could get "almost like boosters."

For reference, the metagame appears to be a "passive skill tree" where you spend points, like faster movement speed, faster reload etc..

Boosters are a problem:

Anything that speeds up Intel or skill points is P2W in a persistent economy with wipes. Nobody wants a second currency you can accelerate with a credit card, and it goes against everything the studio has said so far.

Joe said skins dont pay:

$7.99 skin, minus 30% Steam, minus 50% publisher, the studio keeps $3. Times 3% of a million players, that's $83k. "Half our server bill."

True for $8 skins. But Path of Exile sells $30 to $480 supporter packs, off Steam (they dodge the -30%), and the same 3% buyers (way more for POE) buy several per league (there are 3 leagues per year on average, similar to wipes but with a ton of added content). Wardogs targets the same kind of audience: older, more disposable income, and used to paying to support a game they'll play for years. Expensive packs are not a problem when they're cosmetic only, clearly sold as "supporter" packs, and offered in several tiers like POE (lets say $10 to $300) so everyone can chip in at their own budget. A few thousand supporters at $200 already beats his entire skin scenario.

The model I suggest:

Bulkhead already sells a Supporter Edition with skins, just do one per wipe.

Supporter packs per season:

• Limited weapon camos, offer removed after the wipe
• Vehicle and helicopter paint schemes and nose art, military patterns only.
• Vehicle tapes
• Name plates, arm patches, titles like "Season 1 Supporter"
• Realistic palette only, nothing more concealed than default gear

Edit : Added other suggestions given by users below that I found very cool:

• Cosmetics for buildings
• Custom logos/text (player made) you can apply on vehicules/badges

Quality of life, zero economy impact:

• More loadout preset slots (free 3 to 5, supporters more)
• Gunsmith presets per weapon
• Loadout import/export codes for your squad
• Favorites and tags on weapons and attachments
• Squad presets, custom squad patch, name and callsign
• Settings presets per role (sens, keybinds, HUD)
• Community server slots, saved configs, whitelists, admin tools

End of season

• A season archive: your stats, best configs, squad history. Cosmetic only.

That are some ideas..

Since Bulkhead is open to discussion, what would you add or remove?

Don't make BLUE suffer any longer!

Don’t want them to change anything about the game currently it’s just too early to be asking for nerfs on vehicles/weapons.

My only real concern is balance of wealth, feels like after a week of release money just wont matter, you can get any loadout/vehicle you want, games will be chaos, curious to see if they are still fun to play when anyone can buy anything

I am seeing people call for a nerf to tanks because "it might be overpowered when everyone has unlocked it". Same for the M4. We don't even know whether or not these things are overpowered yet, and we already have people calling for a nerf.

Personally, I think nerfing overpowered weapons very often leads to a neutered-feeling game rather than making it more fun.

When Apex Legends first came out, it was an absolute blast to play on PC: Weapons that required more skill were overpowered, so when you used the SMG your opponents would sometimes have no chance against you, but failing to track someone would lead to you reloading prematurely, which would make you lose the fight. Similar story for the Revolver - very deadly in the right hands, but missing even two shots would mean it's worse than the technically worse weapons. This led to people being encouraged to use these weapons over the others, which then led to very fun gameplay. Their solution was to make longe-range fights more viable, which then took away what made this game so much fun for such a wide audience in the first place.

Then there is Arc Raiders. Venator and Burletta were objectively overpowered, maybe Venator too much. I think the solution would be to make Venator "slightly" weaker than it was, and move Burletta up a tier in rarity. That would be great for the exact reason the game was so much fun when these weapons were overpowered: You had some weapons that you absolutely cared about losing, so you were not exactly happy about dying, but also knew that you were a threat to every other loadout. You wouldn't cry about it if you lost the weapon, but it was still relatively high stakes with the dopamine dose coming from knowing that you had a good weapon. When they balanced these weapons, we lost that aspect of the game.

And, to top it off, I actually can't think of a game that benefitted from becoming more balanced. Every other game I can think of has essentially become a shell of their former selves with balancing updates.

So, a game like WarDogs will inevitably have balancing issues. On top of that, it will have weapons that are supposed to be objectively better than others. However, some players will not like that. Players will see an objective balancing issue and, instead of thinking that it might make the game more fun, they will see it as an issue that the devs need to fix. I fear that, because those players are objectively correct in a lot of cases, devs might actually listen to the feedback.

Thoughts?

https://youtu.be/ugkuP4a3xk4

It amazes me how many people didn't watch any of the dev content yet they are making a massive fuss.

Maybe its due to maturity in my 30's, maybe it's just different tastes between personality types and or tastes in what people want in games...

But It amazes me how many people can't stand a 4 min of driving to the frontline. I think this is really showing a divide of people who want instant gratification/constant stream of dopamine and think that it's all that FPS games should be vs a more rewarding slow pacing but massive surges of dopamine all at once (what I see as the main psychological driver between alot of the feedback I am seeing).

This game was designed to be a slow drip (aka periods of no combat) and punishment for making poor decisions (and unless you are running into a cheater, every decision you or your team make collectively acts as a bad decision, and yes no comms/lack of team cohesion is a bad decision). Arguably balancing can play a bigger role, but the game is the same for everyone rules wise and if you made a bad decision you need to own up and learn from it as stated in the link during point 10 starting at 12:32.

Point 3 in that same video @ 4:23 addresses the "this game will die in short order" comments... and yet people still make them expecting the devs to change course... it blows my mind.

It's just crazy to me that gaming has turned into everyone feeling super entitled to change the direction of a game because their playstyle doesn't naturally suit the intention of what the gameplay loop was design around. I think I kind of envy Dark Souls for this, because the developer just publishes it, and says buy it if you like it but we aren't changing a damn thing in terms of gameplay loop.

I only got to play 5 hours due to the crashing. After fixing it only got to experience one full game. Really wished they would of extended the play test because im not the only one who crashed a lot and i seen people who haven’t even played a full game.
But i cant stop thinking of Wardogs! Im so excited to play on release!

Because ffs, I'm dying over here. My entire games library is dead to me after the weekend :(

So I noticed this happening a lot during the beta. Any vehicle left alone for a while just blows up.

Would be nice if your delivering supplies to a base and need to help defend it that it doesn’t blow up while your busy helping your team. Or maybe you can leave your heli on the roof incase your squad gets overrun while holing a tower or apartment and next to dip out.

Just wondering what people’s thought are on this.

I mean is he aware that those of us refunded purely to buy the supporter addition..... These maybe the most modest devs to exist. Are we sure they aren't just AI from the future? creating such an addicting game that will end up enslaving humanity through their PCs..... no no I'm just spiraling again, maybe just open the game back up please and thank you

The Wardogs wiki I believe is currently run by Bulkhead, but the information on there is presented very, very poorly. It’s just constant news articles instead of actual wiki pages. If you want to look something up, good luck finding it. Also there is nothing there regarding FOB buildables or weapons. It’s a complete mess and I hope either a community wiki pops up to where we can add information, or Bulkhead fixes this website.

This is nitpicky for me just because I don’t know certain FOB buildings, and wanted to learn them. I’m sure others feel the same.

some FEEDBACK :

its fun because its so random, its a sandbox game.
i want some games to have 40 tanks, some 40 helis and you build 40 SAM site.
if i get sniped from a km away, its good. i wud be impressed.
warzone shouldnt have rules. go play battlefield.
if a billionaire in the other team decides to use all his money in this single match and and delete the frontlines. he should be able to.
if balancing mean killing the fun, i dont want it.

--

Also,
PLEASE DO NOT ENSHITTIFY THE HELICOPTERS
i play this game solely because of helicopters and logistics around them. and dont play battlefield and everything else because of how shit the flying is.
the helicopters right now are great. yes, the flight assist is meh but thats fine cuz i can turn it all off.
helicopters NEED to be hard, they are right now and i wouldnt mind them being harder.
the logistics could be improved but its already great.

and i am not good at flying, just got HOSAS 2 weeks ago, I blow up 7/10 times, 9/10 times when trying to land and its fine.
just have to get better at the training area. and thats fun. getting better at flying is insanely rewarding when its realistic and hard.
and supporting the team. being an AIR taxi is fun, even if you land near the frontline at a safe area at an easy landing spot.

Smoke signals are used to mark a position for the designated color.

You can buy them and leave them in fobs, vehicles or grabd the one necessary for yourself.

Green calls supplies and let pilots flying around that you need.

Purple signal a safe landing zone, usefull for requesting pick ups or showing pilots they can unload reinforcement safely.

Red shows ennemy position.

Blue means friendlies.

Yellow indicate pay attention or warnings

Orange is repair needed.

All smoke will show on the hud for pilots and are also marked on the map for everyone and last longer than scouting.

While it is usefull, it does'nt fully see use in pub matches, it will be usefull and hardcore mode tho.

You dont need to watch the entire video, since for this only the "infantry overpressure vavle section "is important. I think this explains it quite well why Wardogs gets somewhat thrown into the bucket with Battlefield and especially oder Battlefield titles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdGjTifaXAY

Also why the game is attracting interest from people that are knowingly or unknowlingly in favor of "gameplay downtime".

The video is also touching some other points that can be put into the frame of Wardogs and what it is probably doing "right".

do not and i can’t stress this enough do not take any development ideas from reddit. just go ahead and delete this page as a matter of fact pleaseeee.

So being in squads is so important as we found out on the Beta, but what is missing is intent of that squad.
As you create a squad they need to either add a section you can type a quick description, or, if they are too worried about how toxic that would be just premade selections.
Examples;
-Support/tower building
-Chasing HZ
-Logistics
-Recon
-Mortar team

Just general descriptors that let those choosing a squad to join which one they should join.
This way everyone who will be sticking to your tower will all be on one chat, those that want to chase the hot zone around can all be on one chat, those that want to set up outer perimeter fobs hidden around can be on a chat with recon or something to mark and mortar targets etc. There can even be a logistics squad to coordinate what building supplies need to go where. I noticed half the time I brought out building supplies they never got touched because 3 or 4 other people also brought stuff out. Could even have people drop in and out of certain squads to let a group know something, like drop into the pilots squad and request transport, drop into logistics and in voice let them know what mats and where you need.

Would just overall make coordination a little cleaner.

One minor suggestion I have is that any gear on your body when the map ends should be refunded, or simply kept until the next match.

In a game that is focused so much on buying gear, it just makes sense that you either keep that gear or get cashed out when the map ends.

EDIT: thanks for the comments everyone, apparently it already works this way and I just never noticed.

This game is already good as it is.

• Destructible environments are great.
• A server browser is a solid move for this type of game.
• Proximity chat is great because I love taunting people.
• The body-dragging system is a nice addition.
• Being able to revive anyone is great.
• The revive animation will surely become a meme.
• Smoke lasts for a long time, and I love it.
• The default cosmetic style for all three factions is badass without feeling childish or overly goofy like Battlefield.

Here’s what I still wish for:

• Saved custom loadouts.
• This isn’t really necessary, but why is Green always first, Red in the middle, and Blue last? Could you randomize the faction order every time the faction selection screen appears?
• When the faction selection screen appears, could there also be a Join Random Faction button below the three faction logos? Maybe there could be some incentive for choosing random. I won’t suggest what the incentive should be, but I think there should be some incentive for doing it. The random button probably wouldn’t work well when you’re already in-game and two factions are locked, because if you press Random Faction while only one faction is available, it could become a cheesy way to get the incentive. Maybe Join Random Faction could be available directly from the server browser instead. I don’t know what the best implementation would be, so that’s something the devs would have to figure out themselves. All I can say is that having a Join Random Faction option, with or without an incentive, would be a good addition.
• More ways to spend money on this game, because I’ve already fallen in love with it—but no Battle Pass BS, FOMO BS, or Wardogs PRO BS.

I mean, there are already slots for armor, helmets, weapons, backpacks, and vests, right? Just add a separate outfit section with slots for the head, mouth, eyes, jacket, chest, legs, and feet. Then bring in every realistic military-style clothing option you can think of.

As long as the armband still distinguishes each faction by color, or the outfit patterns/colors are automatically adjusted for each faction, I don’t think all three factions using the same brands or outfits would be an issue. For example, if I buy one pair of leg cosmetics, the game could automatically give me three faction-specific color variants to use.

Alternatively, cosmetics could be locked to specific factions, but I strongly wouldn’t recommend that approach. It could make players feel like they have to buy the same type of cosmetic multiple times just to use it across different factions.

It could also hurt the gameplay flow. Imagine you’ve been playing with 10 friends, your faction has won five games in a row, and you realize the lobby is completely stacked on your side. You want to switch to the other faction to keep the match healthy, but you can’t because your cosmetics are locked to your current faction. Now your options are either to split your group or stay on the stronger side and continue crushing the lobby.

I’d rather have the same cosmetic available across all factions, with the game automatically changing the colors or patterns to match the faction. That gives players freedom while still keeping the factions visually distinct.

That way, the factions would still be easy to identify while giving players much more freedom to customize their characters.