Developer Bulkhead reflects on the struggles of Wardogs Season 2, needing to slow down its update pace, and solving the progression problem.
Wardogs Season 2 has been a messier experiment that developer Bulkhead would have liked. Its economy wipe was too quickly erased by rapid leveling speeds, and the team admits that it made "a huge mistake" in attempting to stuff fresh content in at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the multiplayer game. To discuss the Season 2 rollout, the rapid Season 3 turnaround, and the team's plans for the future, Executive Producer Joe Brammer is joined by Lead Game Designer Pete Harries, Creative Director Tim Nightingale, and Technical Designer Mark Tadros.
It was still weekend one of Wardogs Season 2 when Bulkhead announced it was planning to bring the Season 3 launch "significantly forward" (the team has since suggested it's currently targeting Thursday November 12). "It kind of puts a sour taste in people's mouths," Nightingale admits. "They're just thinking, 'Oh well, how much do I invest in this season if it's just going to reset again soon?'" Tadros says the faster progression of this update was designed to appeal to more casual players, but the rapid reset counteracted that exact audience.
Another oversight was that while Bulkhead expected players to naturally progress a little faster than they had in Season 1, where everything was completely new and unknown, it underestimated how big this shift would be. "We didn't predict the numbers," Nightingale remarks. "The whole season was too fast," Brammer comments, "but if we had changed nothing [from Season 1] it would still have been too fast."
The huge success of Wardogs was exciting for the team, but Brammer believes it actually had a negative impact on the studio's confidence, and particularly in the ethos it had established in the months leading up to release. "I think that's where my leadership failed. I kept saying, 'We don't have a plan.'" This led the team to react "too much" to player responses, and to attempting to rush new content into the game despite being adamant prior to launch that it wasn't going to be doing so during early access.
"We were like, 'There's going to be a content problem,'" Brammer recalls. "People hit it and actually went further than we thought, and we were so worried about it." He says this led to "a huge mistake on our part" of trying to stuff as much as possible into Season 2. "We let our fears and PTSD from Battalion 1944 [which Bulkhead refunded Kickstarter backers for after its failure to maintain a player base] get in our way." The studio reversed course from its original plan of accepting that lack of new content to focus on core mechanics.
"We worked really hard: 'More stuff, more things in Season 2, get it all in there,'" Brammer continues. "And you know what happened? The quality dropped. We didn't double down on everything, the way we've iterated and iterated for years, thrown things away twice and kept the third one. We didn't do that, we just pushed it out and went, 'Look, there's loads of content.' They went, 'Yeah okay, but the XP is broken.'"
"This weekend was a kick up the arse, really, wasn't it?" Brammer admits, "We've got to slow down. We can't do monthly seasons. We can't keep up." He suggests that three-month refreshes with a smaller update halfway through is the current plan. Alongside this, he says Bulkhead is trying to move away from the "heavy vertical progression" of Season 1, where "all of the 'best stuff' was at the end of the tree."
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.pcgamesn.com/wardogs/season-2-developer-thoughts
