For many Star Wars fans, the dream multiplayer game has always looked the same: a huge battlefield, troops on foot, vehicles everywhere, and a fight that feels like a real war rather than a skirmish. The Star Wars Battlefront games have chased that feeling for two decades. This autumn, a game with no lightsabers in sight is scratching the same itch. WARDOGS, a 100-player shooter from Derby-based studio BULKHEAD, sold three million copies in about two and a half weeks after entering Steam Early Access on 10 September, and it has a lot of Battlefront fans talking.
What WARDOGS is
WARDOGS is a large-scale tactical shooter published by Team17. Every match splits 100 players into three private military companies of roughly 33 each: Lonestar in blue, Valkyra in red and Manticore in green. Battles take place inside a 2 km by 2 km Control Zone drawn from a 256 km² map, and teams score by having more players inside the zone than their rivals. The first faction to 100 points wins. Players start with $10,000 in in-game cash that carries from match to match, so every vehicle and loadout is a gamble with money you keep.
It is a modern military game rather than a science-fiction one, and it is PC only for now, with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series versions planned for 2028. But the structure will feel familiar to anyone who has spent hours in Battlefront’s largest modes.
Why it feels like Battlefront
Scale
Pandemic’s Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005) won fans with big ground battles and an expanded Galactic Conquest mode, which had first appeared in the 2004 original. EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) built its Galactic Assault mode around 40-player fights. WARDOGS goes further, with 100 players on one battlefield. The sense of being one soldier in a much larger war is exactly what Battlefront fans have always asked for.
Objectives that pull everyone together
Battlefront’s best modes worked because they gave a crowd one thing to fight over. Walker Assault on Hoth and Supremacy’s chain of command posts in the 2015 and 2017 games pushed dozens of players towards the same objective, so every battle had a front line. WARDOGS’ Control Zone does something similar. Kills earn cash and experience, but points only come from holding ground, so squads that would otherwise scatter across a huge map end up colliding in the same few streets and ridgelines.
Vehicles and combined arms
Battlefront made walkers, speeders and starfighters part of its biggest battles. WARDOGS does the same with tanks, anti-air vehicles and transports, and its Season 2 update, released on 15 October, added the T-72B3 main battle tank and the Flakpanzer Gepard. Infantry, armour and logistics all matter, and a well-timed vehicle push can decide a round.
A third side changes everything
Battlefront has always been a two-sided affair, Rebels against the Empire or Republic against Separatists. But the Star Wars stories around it rarely are, with bounty hunters, smugglers and crime syndicates all pursuing their own agendas. WARDOGS captures some of that with its three-faction format. When one side pulls ahead, the other two tend to turn on the leader, and any temporary truce collapses the moment one of them gets in front.
Season 2 and a rocky week
The game has not been without problems. Season 2 added new weapons, vehicles and weather, along with a 5 per cent cash bonus for Lonestar, the faction with the lowest win rate. Experienced players piled onto Lonestar for the bonus, others found an exploit to farm driver experience, and faster progression put some players back in top-tier gear within days. BULKHEAD pulled the bonus within a day, and CEO Joe Brammer admitted, “We were wrong.” On 17 October the studio called the faster progression “the wrong call”, promised Limited Mode servers that cap gear and remove heavy tanks, and said it is considering bringing Season 3 forward. Steam’s recent reviews have slipped to Mixed.
The cheating problem
The problem arrived before the game did: ESP overlays that show enemies through walls were reported less than a day into the August closed beta, and paid menus soon advertised Wardogs aimbot features too. Complaints about cheaters have followed the game into Season 2. In a three-faction game, one player who can see through walls affects dozens of opponents across two enemy teams.
BULKHEAD has promised permanent bans, disabled Steam Family Sharing after banned players used it to return, and dealt with what Brammer described as constant DDoS attacks and “bottom feeder cheaters”. Within weeks of launch, cheat sellers were already listing paid tools for the game, and storefronts such as SkyCheats show how quickly that market forms around a new hit. It is exactly the trade BULKHEAD’s ban policy is aimed at, and a cat-and-mouse fight that every large online shooter, Star Wars titles included, has had to face.
What about a new Battlefront?
The timing has added fuel to an old wish. Talk of a Battlefront 3 resurfaced this month after a post on X from Brammer, which MP1st reported on 20 October. Nothing about it is confirmed, and neither EA nor Lucasfilm has announced any new Battlefront game. For now, fans who want that scale of battle will have to look elsewhere.
Should Star Wars fans play it?
If what you loved about Battlefront was the scale, the vehicles and the feeling of being part of a war, WARDOGS is worth a look, even without the Star Wars setting. It is unfinished, it has had growing pains, and it is PC only for now. But it delivers the kind of chaotic, 100-player battles that many fans have wanted from Battlefront for years. Until a new Star Wars game takes up that challenge, this may be the closest thing to the Battlefront dream.