BULKHEAD's HotZone podcast: three-month seasons, Intel progression and a new map

BULKHEAD has started an official podcast called The HotZone. The first episode, "The Wipe", went out on 24 October 2026 and covers the reaction to the Season 2 reset. Below is what the studio said about seasons, progression, weapons, vehicles and the next update. All figures are the studio's own.

Seasons get longer#

According to the studio, monthly seasons are not sustainable for the team. The plan is a season of roughly three months with a smaller update around the halfway point.

BULKHEAD also says Season 2 was overloaded. Worried about running out of content, the team packed too much into it, and quality dropped as a result.

The team also called announcing that Season 3 would be brought forward a mistake (our earlier report). Their view is that the announcement made players ask why they should invest in a season that would reset soon anyway.

Progression: a rework is planned#

The studio describes the current progression as an MVP, a minimum viable version modelled on Arma 3 King of the Hill without perks, and calls it a fundamentally broken system. The rework it described has three parts:

• Intel, a seasonal resource that resets each season. You earn a set amount per day, with no cap for players who play a lot. Intel is not tied to one tree: you spend it on whatever you want to unlock, so a player who only wants the MK22 30 can go straight for it.
• Skill points per role. XP earned as medic, driver, pilot and so on gives skill points for that role's tree, with passives and larger capstone skills that change how the role plays.
• A persistent character that carries across all seasons. The studio says this was always the goal but was not ready in time.

According to the studio, about 70,000 players reached level 35 in Season 1, while millions stalled at role levels 9 and 14. The team believes a role only comes online at level 20, which is why Season 2 sped up those stretches.

Weapons and calibres#

The .308 (7.62x51) nerf is deliberate. The studio says the round sat at the top of the damage tables, and it wants room for new calibres between the existing ones, such as .338 as a dedicated sniper round. That affects rifles like the FAL; our Season 2 weapon meta guide covers where it stands now.

Where the battle rifles and marksman rifles stand after the cut, at 100 m against Level 2 armour:

The team also confirmed the unlock reshuffle: the AK74 is now free, the MP5 4 comes earlier, and the PKM is now at level 15.

Vehicles and tanks#

According to the studio, a driver progression exploit appeared about 10 hours after the Season 2 launch. Fewer than 400 players used it, but tanks then showed up in 30 to 40% of matches, so the impression was that tanks were everywhere.

The tank in question is the T-72B3: in the current data it opens at 20 for $250,000 and costs $16,000 per spawn, while the L2A6 needs 35 and costs $22,000.

The share of players driving went from 9% in Season 1 to 44% on the first day of Season 2, an increase of 340% that the studio attributes to the early tank.

According to the studio, most requests for vehicle limits and timers come from players who arrived from Battlefield. BULKHEAD considered restrictions but sees each one as a cut to the sandbox, and does not want WARDOGS to become another Battlefield: in the team's view, a straight copy of Conquest would not sell anywhere near as well. Its answer to players who want rocket launchers earlier is similar: with a tank in the zone and no RPG in your kit, you play more carefully, though the team admits the balance is not perfect. Thermal scopes, which snipers coming from Battlefield tend to expect, are also not planned: the team considers them too strong.

The blue team bonus#

At launch the blue team got 2.5% extra XP. The studio says the best Season 1 players quickly stacked onto blue, which reached a win rate of about 67%. After the bonus was removed, win rates evened out. The longest matches, the top 5% by length, got about 12% shorter, from 46 to 41 minutes.

According to the studio, Season 1 had about 3.5 million unique players and Season 2 about 1.5 million. The top quarter of players is levelling 2.4 times faster than in Season 1.

What is coming next#

• A new map with interiors, several floors and a hospital. The team says it applies what it learned from Bakurani.
• Restricted servers, working name "primitive": servers with a limited set of gear that recreate the early-game experience for everyone.
• IR binoculars and the rangefinder. Several team members called infrared spotting overpowered. A rework or removal is on the table, and the studio says it should be blocked by foliage.
• Vendor crates at spawn and the cost and fuel of hot zone magnets are being looked at.

Our take: the hospital points to Saburtulo, a full-size map set in Russia that we found in the verified Season 2 data (our earlier article). It has the faction bases Rostokino, Kuzminki and Ramenki, a terrain about 16 km across, King of the Hill and Sniper Showdown setups, and hot zones named Hospital, Bazaar, River and Hillside. BULKHEAD has not named the new map in the podcast, so this is our reading, not a confirmation.

Note: these are plans from a podcast discussion, not patch notes. BULKHEAD has not given dates for any of them.

Source: the episode The HotZone, Ep. 1 "The Wipe" on the BULKHEAD YouTube channel.