WARDOGS vs Arma 3: what actually differs

If you have played Arma 3's King of the Hill, you already know the shape of a WARDOGS match: three teams, one contested zone, buy your kit, first to 100 points. That is not a coincidence and it is not a clone. Sa-Matra and Roid Rage, the original King of the Hill developers, have been involved in WARDOGS from the very beginning — Bulkhead's own framing, reported by Gamesplanet.

So the interesting question is not which is better. It is what changes when a mod stops being a mod. Four things do: scale, money, content and whether the thing runs on your hardware.

The short version

	WARDOGS	Arma 3
Studio	Bulkhead, published by Team17	Bohemia Interactive
Released	Early Access 10 Sep 2026; 1.0 ~24 months later	12 Sep 2013, finished
Entry price	$39.99 → $49.99 → $59.99 as updates land	$29.99 list, discounted often
Players	Up to 100, across 3 teams	"Typical scenarios cater from 2 to 64"
Map	Kolchia, 256 km²	Altis 270 km², Malden 62, Stratis 20
Where you fight	Randomised 2 × 2 km Control Zone	The whole terrain; the mission decides
Modes	One: Control Zone	Campaign, co-op, PvP, thousands of community missions
Money	$10,000 once, per account, persists between matches	Per-server cash and rank, community-documented
Classes	None — your role is whatever you bought	None — the mission or mod defines your kit
Mods	Not announced	Eden Editor + full Steam Workshop
Anti-cheat	Kernel-level Easy Anti-Cheat	BattlEye, Proton-enabled since Dec 2021
Steam Deck	Nobody has said	Works

Sources for the WARDOGS column are the Steam page and Bulkhead's own posts; the Arma 3 column is Bohemia's FAQ unless noted. Everything on the WARDOGS side is confirmed, which is not the same as shipped.

It is King of the Hill rebuilt, not King of the Hill copied

Bulkhead's line is that "the idea was never to simply clone the mod" — they worked with the mod's creators to work out what made it good and what could be better with a real engine underneath.

What carried over: three teams, one zone, a first-to-100 scoreline, and buying your kit instead of picking a class.

What is new: 100-player matches as the default rather than the ceiling, destructible structures, player-built fortifications, and cash that follows your account rather than your session.

This matters for one practical reason. If you bounced off King of the Hill because of Arma's friction — the inventory, the animations, netcode from 2013 — WARDOGS is a ground-up rebuild on Unreal Engine 5, and that friction is gone. If you bounced off it because you do not like the mode, nothing here fixes that. There is exactly one mode. For the full picture of what has been announced, see what WARDOGS is.

The maps are the same size. The fight is not.

Altis is 270 km². Kolchia is 256 km². On raw terrain, this is a draw, and anyone selling you WARDOGS on map size is selling you nothing.

The density is the story. Bohemia's FAQ puts typical Arma 3 scenarios at 2 to 64 players, with the ceiling set by server hardware and bandwidth. WARDOGS is built around 100 across three teams as the normal case.

Then it squeezes them. Only a randomised 2 × 2 km Control Zone is live in any match — 4 km², or one sixty-fourth of the map — with a shifting Hot Zone inside it paying double points and double cash. Arma 3 hands you the whole island and trusts the mission maker to shape the fight.

More on the zone geometry on the Kolchia map page.

Money is the thing Arma has never had

This is the real divergence, and most coverage skips it.

In King of the Hill you earn cash and rank on a server, spend it at your faction's safe zone, and either buy a loadout outright or take the cheaper one-time version that has to be repaid on respawn. It is per-server. Log off, and the pressure resets.

WARDOGS gives you $10,000 once, per account, and it does not top you up. Cash carries between matches, losses are permanent, and Bulkhead's framing is that "every decision has risks and consequences with every outcome etched into your account balance." The full mechanics are in the cash economy explainer.

Here is what that feels like in numbers. These are ours: we played the Closed Alpha on 7–9 August 2026 and photographed the Vehicle vendor. Every price below is the list price, calculated by doubling what the tile showed, because a New Recruit Discount of −50% was running throughout the capture — the reasoning is on our methodology page.

Alpha vendor entry	What it cost	Against a $10,000 start
BOBCAT	$1,000	Pocket change; a lift to the zone
KODIAK	$5,000	Half your opening balance
KODIAK [PICKUP]	$30,000 one-off unlock	Three times what you start with
MH-6 light helicopter	$72,500	Seven times
URAL	$120,000 one-off unlock	Twelve times

And the part that reframes the whole comparison: the tanks were not on sale at all. The L2A6 sat behind Wardog Lvl 35, the Flakpanzer Gepard behind Wardog Lvl 45, the SPH-2 artillery behind Wardog Lvl 55. No cash figure was printed on any of them. Armour in the alpha was gated by time played, not by wallet — a distinction worth holding onto if you see a tank price quoted anywhere.

Nothing in King of the Hill works like this. There, an expensive mistake costs you the rest of a session. Here it is subtracted from a balance you will still be carrying next week.

Arma 3 has thirteen years of content. WARDOGS has 37 weapons.

Arma wins this outright, and Bulkhead says so first. In their 10 Reasons NOT to Buy WARDOGS devlog the studio states plainly: "WARDOGS has a content problem."

Early Access ships with 37 weapons, 21 vehicles and three maps with three variations each, plus one more map during Early Access. The stated reason is budget: most of the money went into core gameplay and performance, "leaving less for content and the shiny things that actually sell games." Bulkhead is explicit that you should not expect regular content drops before 1.0 — the work is bugs, balance and the metagame.

Set that against thirteen years of official Arma DLC, ten-plus terrains, and a Workshop that produced King of the Hill itself. Measured in distinct hours per dollar, this is not close.

The counter-argument is that one mode done deliberately is the point, and King of the Hill players have historically put hundreds of hours into exactly one mode. Our weapons catalogue tracks the 25 we recorded in the alpha vendor against the confirmed 37, and vehicles the 20 we saw against 21.

You cannot mod WARDOGS, and that is the sharper trade

Arma 3 ships the Eden Editor with Steam Workshop integration and dedicated server support. Its entire second decade runs on that. WARDOGS exists because Arma 3 is moddable.

Bulkhead has announced no mod tools, no editor and no Workshop support. That is unconfirmed rather than ruled out — nothing has been said in either direction. Community server admins have been mentioned as having moderation powers, which implies community servers; it does not imply modding.

Stack that on top of "no regular content drops for two years" and you have the real risk of the purchase. If community content is why you still load Arma, WARDOGS replaces one mode, not the platform.

Arma 3 runs on Steam Deck. Nobody has said WARDOGS will.

Arma 3 works on Deck and on Linux because Bohemia opted in: BattlEye's Proton support was enabled for Arma 3 in December 2021.

WARDOGS lists kernel-level Easy Anti-Cheat on its Steam page. EAC also has a Proton-compatible module, and it also requires the developer to switch it on. Bulkhead has not said whether they will. The pre-order announcement did not mention it.

Desktop-side, WARDOGS asks for a GTX 1660 minimum and an RTX 3070 recommended, with 16 GB of RAM at both tiers — the full table is on system requirements. Bulkhead's own warning: "if you're expecting to play native 4K at 240 FPS, WARDOGS is not the game for you."

Controllers are clearer than they were: partial gamepad support ships at Early Access launch, with aim assist that exists "but only to a small degree", on a game the studio calls PC-first.

What you pay, and when

	WARDOGS	Arma 3
Entry	$39.99 Early Access	$29.99 list
Premium	$49.99 Supporter Edition — skins, bobbleheads, a scoreboard tag	DLC and bundles
Included beta	Closed Beta 21–23 Aug 2026 with every pre-order	n/a
Later	$49.99 as year-one updates land, $59.99 at 1.0	n/a
In-game purchases	None during Early Access. Cash and Gold Bars never purchasable	None

Bulkhead calls this stair-step pricing and ties each rise to delivered features rather than to a date. Arma 3 is cheaper, finished and has thirteen years behind it; WARDOGS is $10 more for a build the studio expects to spend roughly 24 months developing, which puts 1.0 somewhere around September 2028.

Two things worth weighing on trust. Bulkhead made Battalion 1944, it failed, and the studio refunded every Kickstarter backer — they raise this themselves rather than waiting to be asked. And their own advice on the price is "if the price feels too high for an early access game, please don't buy it yet." Whether to pre-order is its own argument.

Which one you should actually play

Arma 3, if you want the sandbox rather than one mode, you want the Eden Editor and Workshop, you play on Deck or Linux, or you want something finished today.

WARDOGS, if King of the Hill was the only Arma 3 mode you ever loaded, you want that loop at 100 players without 2013 friction, and you can live with a thin launch lineup for two years.

Both, if you have 400 hours in King of the Hill and no campaign progress. That is precisely the person WARDOGS was built for, by some of the people who built the mod.

One number to sit with before you decide. Arma 3 still averaged 6,638 concurrent players over the last 30 days, peaking at 8,278 in 24 hours, thirteen years after release (SteamCharts, 13 August 2026). Bulkhead's stated target for a healthy WARDOGS is 3,000–5,000 daily concurrents, and they say openly that numbers will fall after the launch spike. If a populated server at 2 a.m. is what you are buying, Arma 3 is the safer bet today.

What nobody knows yet

• Which weapons and vehicles make up the confirmed 37 and 21 — we have logged 25 and 20.
• The names of the three launch maps, or how they relate to Kolchia.
• Official prices for anything. Every figure we publish is an alpha reading, doubled and labelled.
• Four of the six XP tracks. Medic and Pilot are named; Driver and Wardog appeared as vendor gates.
• Mod support, crossplay, cross-progression and Proton compatibility.

Send us a correction if you have a source we do not. That is the fastest way this page gets better.