As the game sits in Week One of Season 2, indie large-scale shooter Wardogs is suffering from a plague of negative reviews. Right now, the game sits at Mixed for its recent reviews with just 55% of reviews skewing positive on Steam.
“Steam’s algorithm doesn’t push you if your recent reviews slip to mixed,” executive producer Joe Brammer told PCGamesN in a recent discussion. “If you go to mostly negative, you’re just like: bang, no advertising. So we didn’t sell many new copies of the game this weekend.”
Steam review bombs have become a common element of PC gaming culture as of late. Helldivers 2, another popular PC game, consistently bounces from review bomb to review bomb with one earlier this month over the addition of a new anti-cheat solution that has already been cracked by modders.
Wardog’s review bombing is of a different nature. Earlier this month, the team released a rushed Season Two, and with news that Season Three will launch even faster, there’s significant worry from fans.
Brammer explains that Wardogs is already suffering from the Mixed recent reviews label on Steam, but “if we go to mostly negative, we’ve got to go to our board and answer questions”. He continued: “We’ve got business and investment issues, it’s a business at the end of the day, and we have to react to certain things.”
There is a sentiment that fans are expecting more out of Wardogs due to the fact that it feels like a AAA experience. “The success we suffer from now is that people now assume immediately that we’re much bigger than we are,” added creative director Tim Nightingale.
“We are testing every single day; there isn’t a point where we’re not testing and we’re not looking at these things,” he continued. “Live service is new for us in terms of the things we’ve got to really keep a beat on, understand where players are going to push back on things, changes that we make – what they’re going to like, what they’re not going to like.”
Brammer explains that “reviews matter to us” and while he won’t push people to change their reviews now, they hope players will “consider updating” their scores when new content drops. Right now, though, the game is still performing well, although fans are upset as they wait for new content to come to the game.
The producer explained that, in recent weeks, the team has reacted “too much” instead of forming concrete plans. It does seem that it will take a little while for Wardogs to get in the right direction, but considering the quality of the game on launch, it’ll probably be worth it.
