WARDOGS Closed Beta 2: What Bulkhead Changed, What It Did Not Say, and What Launch Week Looks Like

If you came here for a list of buffs and nerfs, here is the honest version: Bulkhead has not published one. Not for the first closed beta, not for the second, and not for the alpha before them. Everything in this article is from the studio's own announcements on Steam and from their segment at The FPS Games Show, and where they said nothing, so do we.

What Closed Beta 2 was for

Bulkhead announced it on 1 September, two days early, and was unusually plain about the purpose. In their words it was “a genuine scale test where we want players to jump in and break our systems”, run “right after The FPS Games Show” on 3 September. Access came in waves to pre-order holders rather than to everyone at once, and they explained why: to “test areas of the game that only break at scale, such as server scaling and browsing, Twitch Drops, DLC entitlements, VOIP and our login queue.”

Read that list again. Not one item on it is about a gun, a map or a vehicle. It is a list of backend systems, and it is the clearest statement anyone has made about what the two betas were: infrastructure rehearsals for launch, run on a build the studio was content to leave as it was.

Then it became an open beta

On 5 September the plan changed. Bulkhead's Steam post is three lines long: “THE CLOSED BETA IS NOW AN OPEN BETA! Come break our servers. Until the Beta ends, Sunday at 08:00 UTC.” Two days after arguing that a closed test was the responsible way to find scale problems, they opened the doors to everyone for the final day and a half.

Our reading, and it is a reading: the waves worked well enough that the last question left was what happens when the doors are simply open, and the cheapest way to answer that was to open them while there were still five days to fix whatever broke. It is also the only time before launch that a player without a pre-order could form their own opinion of the game, which matters for a title whose marketing has leaned entirely on players' word of mouth.

The announcement at the show was not a feature

The 1 September post promised “a HUGE announcement that no one will see coming” at The FPS Games Show. It was not a map, a mode or a weapon. It was money.

Bulkhead is running a $100,000 real-cash clip contest. Their segment put it directly: the best marketing for the game “hasn't been the trailers or the vlogs” but “the genuine word of mouth reactions and clips from our alpha and beta playtesters”, so the marketing budget goes to players. A month after launch they compile the top 100 clips, every featured player wins $100,000 in in-game cash, and the single best clip wins $100,000 in real money. Entry is playing the game and posting clips with the hashtag WARDOGS100K, or submitting them at their contest site.

Whatever you think of a cash prize as a launch strategy, it is consistent with everything else Bulkhead has done: the game has no battle pass and no microtransactions, and the studio has repeatedly told people not to pre-order until they have watched players rather than trailers. This is that instinct with a budget behind it.

The same segment closed by switching the beta back on live, for pre-order holders, with “the servers are spinning up as we speak”. That was the actual start of Closed Beta 2.

What did not change, as far as anyone can tell

The weapon numbers. Every database we read stamps its figures with the build it recorded them on, and across the alpha and both betas none of them logged a damage, rate of fire or price change on any of the 35 weapons recorded so far. The M4 was $2,800 with 28 damage at 800 RPM in August and it is the same on our snapshot today. That is not proof nothing moved, because nobody is publishing a diff. It is the absence of any evidence that anything did.

Our tier list carries the same stamp for the same reason: it reads Pre-launch, Closed Beta 1 to Closed Beta 2, because that is what its 5 sources actually played. Nothing on this site calls anything a launch figure yet.

What launch week looks like

Early Access is 10 September 2026 on Steam, Windows only, with Bulkhead saying the game will stay in Early Access for one to two years. Bulkhead has said 37 weapons for launch, against the 35 recorded across the tests, so expect two the databases have not seen. Its own marketing has named only four guns by model, and did that sideways, through the camos in the Supporter Edition.

Two things we will be watching on day one, because they are the two things nobody has been able to record yet. Whether the vendor prices survive contact with the live economy, since every price on this site is a closed-test reading and the studio has never confirmed one. And whether the launch build carries the first real balance pass, because a studio that ran two betas without publishing a changelog has either changed nothing or is saving it.

When either lands, the weapon pages and the tier list refresh from the sources that record it, and this article stays what it is: a record of what was known on the last weekend before launch.

Community-recorded from Closed Alpha and Closed Beta vendor screens, cross-checked across independent databases. Bulkhead publishes no official weapon figures, and Early Access can retune any of them. Tier placements are read live from our own list, which is built from 5 attributed published rankings rather than from telemetry, so they move as that list does. Statistical data is based on external APIs and publicly available information. It may differ from official data.