After receiving a massive amount of praise for its early beta tests, the highly anticipated military sim FPS Wardogs finally launched in early access today. While the explosive popularity of the game would normally be a fantastic boon for an indie company like Bulkhead, the influx of players coming to Wardogs with the early access release has been a double-edged sword.
Even with the goodwill earned during its marketing and beta tests, the Steam page for Wardogs has been getting flooded with negative reviews complaining about the egregiously long queue times to get into a match, connection errors, and more that have earned it the dread "mixed" review score thanks to only 57 percent of reviews being positive.
While players seemed able to forgive the longer queue times at first, countless players have reported that after waiting 40 minutes to several hours to get into a match, Wardogs would crash and force them to complete the process all over again to access the game.
It isn't just the increased capacity causing problems with the launch of Wardogs either, as some of the most upvoted reviews on Steam have noted that the developers also swapped the anti-cheat last minute. No longer running on Proton, this means both Steam Deck players and many on Linux are no longer able to play despite having no problems doing so in the beta tests, and boasting a SteamDB page claiming that they can.
Much like the anti-cheat changes, many of these problems have only started occurring with the launch of Wardog's early access build and weren't present at all in the open betas, leading many players to ask "what exactly were those playtests for" if it didn't help the developers prepare for the latest release.
As if there weren't enough issues, one of the most volatile aspects of the reviews comes from the accusation that Bulkhead has been "whitelisting streamers while everyone else who paid for the game is stuck dealing with queues and connection issues." Although Bulkhead has denied these claims and says they're working to undo many of the false bans, it seems not all players are buying it.
The biggest concern with the state of Wardogs' public release is that it seems to be draining much of the goodwill the game has been building in the months leading up to the launch, with players citing a lack of communication and even outright lying when it came to some aspects of the release being a major red flag for what's to come.
With the next few weeks being critical turning points for Wardogs as a new competitor in the milsim FPS market, the already frustrated player base of the PC exclusive release will need more incentives to stick around to see the game flourish.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/wardogs-review-score-launch-queues-steam/
