PvP shooter Wardogs is getting a second beta before its EA release on September 10, 2026. It was supposed to be announced later, but the developers had too much respect for the hype.
When does the second beta run? The second and thus final beta before the start of Early Access runs from September 3, 9:00 PM German time, to September 6 at 10:00 AM German time.
Also, the second beta for the upcoming Wardogs will be a closed one. To participate, you must request access via the Steam page and hope to be selected, or pre-order the game on Steam for guaranteed access.
“We actually planned to save this announcement for the FPS Games Show, but…”
Why is the beta running as it is? The developers actually wanted to share the second beta at the FPS Games Show, but they had too much respect for the hype that players have for the game.
“We actually planned to save this announcement for the FPS Games Show, but we don’t want to let the hype spiral out of control, that’s why…” the developers write in their beta announcement on X. This refers to the experience of their first beta for Wardogs, which not only attracted almost 500,000 players with nearly 105,000 simultaneous players at peak but also significantly exceeded expectations (see X).
Chef Joe Brammer also shares the reasoning why this beta is a closed one rather than an open beta:
Imagine a house is on fire, and you are a firefighter… You arrive at the scene, and your only job is to extinguish the fire… Only later, when the house has burned down… days later, the cause of the fire is found out.
In this situation, we are essentially igniting a controlled fire and observing what burns the fastest to prevent and manage a fire in the future, should it occur.
Our system is completely new… and although it has undergone numerous automated tests with artificial clients… real people are different.
When we open the floodgates, very, very few systems can handle the numbers we achieved in our first beta. That 100,000 players flood a queue is not particularly helpful for us… What we want to know are actually boring things, like: “What happens when over 100,000 players are in the server browser and everyone clicks on servers…”
It’s infinitely harder to find the cause of a problem when everything is in flames – and that’s the best analogy here.
Joe Brammer via X
The closed beta is thus a much more controllable and manageable fire than if the developers were to open the gates to all interested parties in an open beta.
Thus, the first beta was also very popular. Even MeinMMO editor and shooter expert Dariusz did not want to miss out on participating and was surprised and thrilled: I did not fire a single shot in a new PvP shooter on Steam for an hour, and it was the most exciting gameplay that a game has offered me in 2026
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