WARDOGS Season 3 Date, Sabatulo Map and Season 2 Patch Notes

WARDOGS Season 3 starts on 12 November 2026, and the section right after the summary covers what Bulkhead has confirmed. Season 2 went live on 15 October 2026 as Update 0.2.0. Bulkhead posted the full Season 02 patch notes on Steam the day before: four new guns, four new vehicles, a Molotov, rain, and a balance pass that cuts high-calibre damage and armour protection. Within hours of launch the studio rolled part of it back, and on 17 October it called the faster progression the wrong call. WARDOGS, developed by Bulkhead and published by Team17, entered Steam early access on 10 September 2026. The rest of this piece covers when Season 2 arrived, what its patch notes changed and what Bulkhead has walked back since.

Bulkhead dated Season 3 on 6 November 2026 in a Steam post and a devlog: it drops on 12 November. Neither gives a time of day. These are the changes the studio has named. We read the devlog from YouTube’s captions and have not played the season.

• New map. Sabatulo brings urban warfare and close-quarters combat.
• Three-month seasons. Early and mid-game progression gets slightly longer and is managed closer to Season 1.
• Multi-track unlocks. Items that suit more than one role appear on each of those tracks. The studio’s example: a pilot who wants .308 armour-piercing ammo no longer needs WARDOG level 140 and can unlock it on the Pilot track.
• Limited Mode. A separate mode with restricted gear. The examples given are FMJ-only ammo, armour capped at Tier 2 and no Havocs. Cash and XP earned there spend in the default mode and the other way round. The full list is still being decided.

Still unpublished: the start time and exactly what resets. The devlog calls it a brand new season, and the Gold Exchange rule quoted further down says level progression and cash reset at the end of a major update cycle, but Bulkhead has not spelled out the Season 3 reset. The Steam post promises a Patch Notes Preview early in the week of 9 November. The same devlog announced 185,000 bans, covered in our money guide.

The servers went down for maintenance on 15 October from 08:00 to 09:30 UTC, and Bulkhead posted “Season 02 is now live” on Steam at 09:59 UTC. Here is how the date was set.

Bulkhead dated Season 2 on 22 September 2026 in a Steam post titled “Season 02 Teaser”: “WARDOGS Season 02 is coming. 📅 15th October 2026. Stay tuned for more details.” (Steam). The post gives no time of day and no content list. It follows a same-day cluster of posts from 18 September 2026. At 12:44 UTC, CEO Joe Brammer posted on X that he’d played the Season 2 build already: “I got to play the Season 2 build today, I wish we could get it out faster.. but reality is time exists.” Half an hour later, at 13:13 UTC, when a follower asked directly when it lands, he replied: “It’s about a month after launch, so 3 weeks away-ish.” Since WARDOGS launched into early access on 10 September 2026, that estimate pointed at roughly 9–12 October; the date Bulkhead announced, 15 October, is a few days later. Then at 17:50 UTC, the official @WARDOGS account posted, on the one-week anniversary of launch, that “Work on Season 02 is already underway. We’ll share more information as soon as we can.” PCGamesN independently corroborated the exact wording of Brammer’s quotes and timing the same day.

Content-wise, Brammer has said very little beyond a promise. He confirmed Season 2 brings “lots of new content and changes,” specifically calling out material that was cut to hit the early access launch date as “now coming to fruition.” In the same post he added that “Season 2 and 3 look sick,” meaning Season 3 is already in some form of development alongside Season 2, though no detail on it existed beyond that line until 17 October (see After Launch below). A press report also notes that Bulkhead has previously said it doesn’t plan to expand dramatically on maps, vehicles, and weapon types during early access, which is worth keeping in mind when reading “lots of new content” — it’s a framing constraint from the studio, not a promise of new maps or guns. Separately, Brammer’s earlier statement on 27 August 2026 confirmed Season 1 itself runs one month, while seasons 2, 3 and 4 are left flexible and decided by Bulkhead as development goes.

What Bulkhead has said about the shape of a season is on record from the week before. On 12 September Brammer wrote: “Each season we will change the order of progression and implement new weapons and vehicles etc. We will also rotate out existing ones. As we build the meta, more and more of the game will be persistant and saved to your account” (X, 12 Sep 2026). On 11 September, asked about server search by name, he replied “Yep on it season 2” (X, 11 Sep 2026), adding in the same thread that the team might speed it up (Insider Gaming, 14 Sep 2026). So the categories were confirmed (new weapons and vehicles, a reshuffled progression order, rotation of existing gear, server search by name) while the specific items were not.

The first official description came in the Update 0.1.2 notes on 30 September: “Season 02 is planned to be a larger content update, with new map conditions, equipment, balance reworks and additional features. More information on Season 02 will be dropping next week.” Two days later the IR Goggles & CIWS Balance Hotfix named one item: the IR Rangefinders “will be disabled in the vendor until Season 02, where they will require batteries to use”, because BULKHEAD agreed with players that they were too overpowered. None of these posts listed Season 2 content item by item; the list came on 9 October and the numbers on 14 October; both are below.

BULKHEAD’s Season 02 Preview devlog (9 October 2026) gave the first item-by-item list, and the patch notes (14 October) added unlock levels and prices. In the table, the first price unlocks the item on its track and the second is the vendor price. New attachments come with the guns: optics, muzzle devices, magazines and bipods. The T-72B3 is slower than the L2A6 but cheaper and slightly more fuel-efficient. Rain cuts spotting range and weakens Molotov fire, and thunder, heard by the whole server at the same moment, is loud enough to mask footsteps.

Balance changes, with the numbers

The biggest change is damage. Base damage is down for every weapon that fires these rounds, vehicle guns included: .308 Winchester −25%, 7.62x54mmR −20%, 7.62x39mm −19% and .50 Cal −16%. Bulkhead says high-calibre assault rifles, DMRs and LMGs were doing close to sniper damage at a much faster fire rate. Sniper rifles get more hit-location damage to make up for the cut.

Armour protects less. Level 3 armour and helmets drop from 55% to 50% damage reduction, Level 4 from 65% to 60%. The Level 4 helmet now muffles audio and proximity chat, narrows your field of view and fogs over when you sprint. Suppression was rebuilt and is much stronger from small and medium calibres; a Level 3 helmet cuts it by 68%, a Level 4 helmet by 80%.

Three more that change how you play. Parachutes take longer to open and won’t open at all below about 10 m. The MGL-40’s muzzle velocity is down 25%. The Infrared Range Finder now runs on batteries, about 80 seconds of active use per battery.

Team rules and factions

Once a team is more than 10 points ahead, switching sides gets harder: you can’t switch again for 15 minutes, and after a switch your map stays hidden and the spawn vehicle stays locked until you first reach the control zone. Teamkills now go to a vote by the victim, who picks Forgive or Punish; punishments add up to kicks and escalating bans. All three team spawns on Bakurani have moved. The patch notes also give a team at least 40 points behind second place 20% off at the vendor. The Lonestar bonus is covered under After Launch.

The Wager Vendor

The Wager Vendor lets you bet your own cash on your own performance, with a live tracker above the minimap. It was not in the game at launch: the patch notes say it opens later in Season 2 and is meant to come and go during a season. Our WARDOGS metagame breakdown covers what is known.

After Launch: What Bulkhead Changed in Three Days

On launch evening (20:58 UTC) the official WARDOGS account said “we got a few things wrong” and pushed a backend update. It removed the Lonestar cash and XP win bonus and teamplay multipliers that the patch notes had announced. It also fixed driver progression and an exploit that let many players reach tanks too early, and it promised Limited Mode Servers without power weapons and vehicles. The post does not say whether the losing-team discount stays.

On 17 October (11:02 UTC) Bulkhead went further. It said speeding up progression was “the wrong call”: some players reached Tier 4 armour and main battle tanks within days, so the wipe “never really landed”. The studio will fix what is clearly out of balance but won’t do a reset that weekend. Instead it is looking at bringing Season 3 and some of its content forward significantly, with details in a dev vlog the following week.

Is there another wipe coming?

Season 3 now has its date, 12 November. The lines below show how Bulkhead got there. The Season 2 patch notes don’t mention a wipe at all. Bulkhead’s 17 October post rules out a reset on 17–18 October and names an earlier Season 3 as its route to a fresh start. On 24 October the studio went further in the first episode of its official podcast, THE HOTZONE, Ep 1 “The Wipe”: “Give it a few weeks. We’ll wipe a bit earlier”, with Season 2 running about “four, five” weeks instead of “six, seven, eight” (31:29). That is a spoken estimate, not an announced date. After it, Bulkhead says it cannot keep up with monthly seasons and plans three-month seasons with a smaller update halfway (47:37). It is also preparing limited-gear servers it calls “primitive”, meant to replicate the low-to-mid game for everyone (48:23); the 6 November devlog names them Limited Mode and puts them in Season 3. The studio’s next vlog, on Season 2 and Season 3, is promised for “later next week”. If Season 3 follows the Gold Exchange rule quoted below, it would reset level progression and cash, but Bulkhead has not said so yet.

The mechanics behind a WARDOGS season reset are documented on the site’s own Gold Bars season-end explainer: cash is what gets wiped and converted, and Gold Bars are the one part of the economy a reset doesn’t touch. The site’s WARDOGS money guide also covers how cash works as a running balance rather than a per-match allowance, which is worth reading before you spend your first Season 2 cash. The rule itself is printed in the game, on the Gold Exchange panel, as quoted by wardogshub.gg and other community sources: “At the end of a major update cycle your level progression and cash will be reset. The date of any major update and progression reset will be announced ahead of time. Any remaining cash at the end of a cycle will be automatically exchanged for gold bars.” We have not checked the panel in the client ourselves; the wording is consistent across the sources.

Sources and Confidence

This table separates what the studio has confirmed from what comes out of press previews, and what is still just circulating. Each claim below is tied to the post and the game version it describes.