Why cash, not kills, is WARDOGS' real scoreboard

Most shooters measure you in kills. WARDOGS measures you in money.

The mantra is "cash is earned and cash is king", and I keep coming back to it as the most important decision in the whole design. Cash isn't a score here. It decides what risks you can take, what gear and vehicles you can afford, and how much you stand to lose when it goes wrong.

I haven't played it yet (the closed beta is next weekend), so treat this as reading the design, not a review.

Everything earns. Even standing in the zone

Here's the part that sold me on the whole design: basically everything can earn you cash.

Being inside the Control Zone streams a little money your way the whole time you're in it. Small money, but constant. While in the hotzone it's doubled. Not just the constant money ticks, but also anything else you do earns you double while in the HZ.

The real money is in the actions. Kills, destroying vehicles, reviving teammates. Then flying people around, hauling supplies, spotting for your team, building. If there's a way you want to play the sandbox, there's money in it.

Want to spend a whole match as a pilot taxi? That's a job with a salary. Want to sit on a hill with binoculars and mark targets? Paid, even when someone else takes the shot.

There's no role you get locked into. You decide what this life is about, and the money follows.

XP unlocks it, cash buys it

XP is what gets you access to the new stuff: weapons, vehicles, attachments, even tapes with music to listen to in vehicles.

But access isn't ownership. Everything you take into a match, you still pay dollars for.

So XP fills the shop. Your balance decides what you walk out with.

You set your own stakes when you buy your kit

Every kit you run costs dollars. Every life.

And there's no loot to drop, no haul to carry out. Dying doesn't take a single dollar you've already earned.

What dying does is cut short the earning run of the kit you paid for. The spend already happened. The only question is whether your actions pay it back before you die. Die early and the kit was a loss. Earn it back and you're up.

Killing people is a means, not the goal. The goal is ending the match with more money than you started with, and kills are just one of the ways to get there.

Run the free stuff, no armor and the free weapon, and you'll probably die fast and kill nobody. But you also don't lose a single dollar.

Buy a helicopter and the math flips. Now you need at least one full, successful transport of peeps into the control zone before the thing has paid for itself. Crash it and the loss is ugly.

The more you spend, the more you have to earn to come out ahead. High risk, high reward, by definition. And you pick your risk level at the buy screen, not the game.

BULKHEAD is explicit about it: every death, vehicle purchase, journey and decision shows up in your account balance.

• Dying isn't a five second annoyance before respawn. It's the kit you're wearing, minus whatever you earned back while wearing it.
• A vehicle stops being a free spawn and turns into an investment you weigh against the payout you're chasing.
• A long flank costs time, time in the zone is money, so your route becomes a money decision.

Even if you lose the match... if you made some cash and got some XP, it feels like you achieved something. You're just missing out on a little extra cash that you get for winning the round.

If the balance is right, caution and greed pull against each other for the whole match, and the players who do well are the ones managing risk rather than the ones with the best aim.

Big "if" though. Nobody outside the studio has played enough of this to know whether the economy ends up punishing or thrilling. But the intent is the right one.

Bribes and tips

Cash isn't only for buying gear. You can hand it to other players. Bribes to get your way, tips to reward a good dropoff, revive etc.. Positive reinforcement with actual dollars goes a long way.

The obvious one: you're downed with an expensive kit on. Put up a bribe and your problem becomes a paid job. Somebody on the team takes it, because the risk now has a price on it.

Tips run the other way and matter just as much. Somebody flies you elegently into the HZ, or revives you on the frontlines. Tip them and they'll keep doing it. That's the positive feedback loop that makes WARDOGS special. Not like the modern Battlefield syndrom of medics that just run past you while downed.

What the economy is not

"Cash in a game" makes people think monetization, so to be clear: in-game cash, gold bars and status-based skins will not be purchasable. During Early Access there's no in-game monetization at all, other than an optional Supporters Edition with cosmetic items.

Your balance can only be earned the hard way. That separation is what makes the whole economic design worth taking seriously in the first place.

You can read the framing in BULKHEAD's own words via Team17's reveal coverage, and the Steam page is where the rest should land as Early Access gets closer.

The beta opens next weekend. I'm planning to get poor learning it.

• Ted