Bulkhead has published the Closed Beta schedule, closing the one question the store page had left open since pre-orders went live on 11 August:
"Servers will be live from: 17:00 UTC Friday – 02:00 UTC Monday"
That is Friday 21 August 17:00 UTC through to Monday 24 August 02:00 UTC — one continuous window rather than three sessions, so you log in whenever suits you. It is the same shape the Closed Alpha ran to the hour, which is worth noting: those alpha times were only ever reported, from outlets citing @WARDOGS posts that never reached Steam. The beta's are Bulkhead's own, on its own news hub.
Note where the window ends. The store page sells the beta as "August 21th – 23rd", but the servers stay up two hours into Monday. Anyone planning around Sunday night has longer than the store copy implies.
The NDA is lifted before the test, not after it
"The NDA is lifted. Share your best moments, clips or streams, and tag us on social channels."
This is the reversal. The alpha ran under a content embargo — record yes, publish no — that held until 11 August, two days after the test finished, which meant the first public look at WARDOGS arrived a week late and secondhand. The beta starts with permission already granted. Expect footage from 17:00 UTC Friday, and expect the first impressions of a build three weeks from launch to be forming in public over the weekend.
Our alpha NDA guide is now a record of how the previous test worked rather than advice for this one.
Pre-loading is live, and the free pool waits
Three operational details in the same post:
- Pre-load is available now. The beta appears as a separate "WARDOGS Playtest" entry in your Steam library, not inside the pre-ordered game. An installed client is not a playable one — access errors before 17:00 UTC Friday are the clock.
- The first wave of invites has gone out. Bulkhead says pre-orders "blown past expectations".
- The free Request Access pool is being held back. In Bulkhead's words, it will not be "that aggressive with adding players from the sign-up pool until later in the weekend", so it can watch server scaling and stability before Early Access. Nothing in your library on Friday is not a rejection. Nothing by Sunday is.
That last point is the practical one for anyone who used the free route. The queue is deliberately slow, and it is slow because 100-player servers are the thing being tested.
How to get in, and what time it opens where you are → · Live outage tracker → · Steam concurrent count →