Battalion 1944: how BULKHEAD designed the shooter it made before WARDOGS

Battalion 1944 is the Second World War tactical shooter BULKHEAD made before WARDOGS — same studio, same genre, and a design record that survives only in archive captures of the studio's own 2017 pages. Those pages are unusually specific about what the game was for: maps drawn as figure-eights in the Counter-Strike tradition with the verticality of the classic Call of Duty layouts, a stated refusal to make unlocks the reward, a post-playtest change list that put performance ahead of scenery, and an alpha patch that cut movement speed in every stance by 30% and strafe-jump distance by 25%. All of it is the studio's own wording, captured in May and July 2017 and read on 29 September 2026.

What the studio said the game was for

The clearest statement of intent is a line on the studio's own features page: maps were built as figure-eights in the Counter-Strike tradition, with the verticality of the classic Call of Duty maps, and they were sized around close-quarters infantry fighting rather than long sightlines. The same page takes a position on progression that is worth quoting because of what it refuses: the studio argued that skill should come from how you play rather than from what you have unlocked, which is a direct rejection of the unlock-first ladder that most shooters of that period were built on (archived studio features page, captured 27 May 2017, read 29 September 2026).

That refusal is the thread running through everything else on this page. When the studio later cut movement speed, it said why. When it rebuilt a map's clutter, it said why. This is a developer that wrote its reasoning down, and the reasoning is the part that does not exist anywhere else — the pages themselves are gone from the live web and the coverage of the period only ever recorded the conclusions.

A development update published the following winter, captured on 27 May 2017, listed the maps actually in production and said what each was for. Five were named, all with the caveat that the names were not final: a manor-house layout inspired by Brecourt Manor, built for trench fighting around German howitzers with sniping positions in the French barns and the house itself; a D-Day layout based on the Omaha Beach landings, which the studio set out to make the first honestly competitive version of that landing — balanced for five-versus-five Search and Destroy by starting players after the beach had been taken, instead of repeating the spawn-and-die cycle that came from giving one side the high ground; a city layout organised around a central station bridge as the mid-lane focal point; a three-lane village layout aimed at players arriving from the older Call of Duty titles; and a training map set at the British airfield used in the early episodes of Band of Brothers. The same update gave the studio's attrition rate on layouts, which is the part no write-up of the game carries: for every map the team finished, two more had been thrown away (archived studio development update, captured 27 May 2017, read 3 October 2026).

How a playtest turned into a change list

After a public hands-on show, the studio published a numbered change list rather than a thank-you note, and the first item was a trade-off rather than a feature: visual fidelity against performance, decided in favour of performance. The studio kept the player readable, removed scenery clutter that got in the way, and said the machines on the show floor ran the game at 144 frames per second easily and past 300 once the frame limiter was lifted. Nothing in that list is a marketing claim about how good the game looked; it is a list of things that were cut or kept, with the reason attached (archived studio change list, page dated 12 May 2017, captured 27 May 2017, read 29 September 2026).

It is a small thing, and it is the reason this page exists. A studio that publishes its trade-offs is a studio you can hold to them later — and the same instinct shows up in WARDOGS, where the Early Access block on the store page explains why the price is lower now and higher at 1.0 instead of quietly raising it (WARDOGS store listing, read 30 September 2026).

The same priority shows up in what the studio said it took away from GDC in San Francisco that spring, and the conclusion was a performance target rather than a feature list. Unreal Engine 4 is demanding on PC by default, so the work went into pulling more frames out of lower-end machines and making the high end more stable, without sacrificing too much visual fidelity — and the studio said plainly that a stable, fluid game mattered more to it than visual prowess, because that is how the classics felt (archived studio announcement, page dated 11 April 2017, captured 27 May 2017, read 3 October 2026).

The alpha patch, item by item

The most concrete document is the alpha v0.2 patch note, which is a list of cuts rather than additions. Each line below is the studio's own (archived studio patch note, page dated 11 July 2017, captured 23 July 2017, read 29 September 2026):

The same note repeats that the test agreement was still in force, which tells you what kind of test it was: an invitation-only alpha whose participants were not free to publish footage or to discuss it outside the studio's own channels. That is a limitation, and it is the reason almost none of the reasoning above survived on the open web. It also sets a useful boundary for reading any of it — this is what the studio was willing to tell its testers in 2017, not a public balance manifesto.

Why the movement cuts matter more than the rest

A 30% cut to movement speed and a 25% cut to strafe-jump distance are not tuning tweaks; they change who wins a duel. Taken with the prone animation rework and the removal of the long-range pistol headshot, the alpha v0.2 list is one consistent decision: take speed out of the fight so that aim and positioning decide it. The studio had already said it did not want unlocks deciding outcomes, and the same principle applied to movement (archived studio patch note, read 29 September 2026).

Whether that worked is not something this page can tell you. The notes say what changed and why; they contain no measurements of the result, no retention figure and no win-rate delta, and we found no later document that supplies one. What the notes do give you is a developer's own statement of the problem, which is more than a review can offer.

A development update captured on 27 May 2017 set out what the movement was meant to be before any of it was cut. The stated target was a blend of three games for feel and movement — the competitive Call of Duty 4: Promod ruleset, Call of Duty 2, and Counter-Strike — chosen so that moving would be easy to pick up and hard to master, consistent enough for competitive players to practise their routes and loose enough for trick jumps. The studio said it was weighing the benefits and drawbacks of strafe jumping, bunny hopping and crouch-jumping air movement against one another, and that community server admins and modders were expected to turn those mechanics into dedicated trick-jump maps and servers (archived studio development update, captured 27 May 2017, read 3 October 2026).

How the studio checked whether a map worked

The studio did not judge its first map by opinion. It published a heat map: every death recorded on every official server across the alpha weekend, on the game's first and smallest map, plotted onto one image, which the build could produce because it tracked the statistics (archived studio alpha recap, page dated 31 May 2017, captured 23 July 2017, read 2 October 2026). Reading it, the team looked for two things — choke points "really lighting up", and how much of the fighting happened inside the manor house itself, because the manor had been built as the close-range focal point of the map in Team Deathmatch. Their conclusion was that the manor was being fought over the way they intended, that the lanes around it still carried traffic, and that the layout was "headed in the right direction" with tweaks queued for the next alpha.

Two things make that method worth keeping. It tests a design intent against data rather than against a designer's memory of a playtest, and it names the intent: a manor house deliberately made the place where close-quarters fights would concentrate. Neither the heat map nor the reading of it appears in any write-up of Battalion 1944 outside the studio's own page.

Why there was no date, and no weekly patch

Two production decisions were written down in the same recap, and together they explain the holes in this record. The studio said it saw "little reason to put out minor weekly updates that show minor progress", and would rather push larger updates over longer periods so that each one was worth coming back for. And it said the Beta and Early Access dates had "never been officially announced for this reason" — the reason being the freedom to polish the game before it shipped on Steam (archived studio alpha recap, page dated 31 May 2017, captured 23 July 2017, read 2 October 2026).

Its justification is a sentence about the rest of the market rather than about itself: "The Steam release needs to be as polished as possible, evidenced by the numerous rushed Early Access releases right now that never make it to full release." That is the only place in the material read for this site where the missing dates are explained rather than simply recorded as missing. The dates themselves, once they were published, are on the launch page.

The testing mistake the studio wrote down

After the second alpha weekend the studio published its own post-mortem on networking, and the sentence to keep is the admission rather than the fix: "A mistake we made this alpha was having too many local/lan tests and not enough online tests" (archived studio recap, page dated 21 July 2017, captured 19 August 2017, read 2 October 2026). The remedy followed within days of v0.2: the studio's design programmer took on the netcode, and the recap reports that players on higher ping would see the biggest improvement while players on normal ping would find the game felt smoother.

What is unusual is the disclosure. A patch note records what changed; this records what the studio did wrong while testing. It is also the only stated cause behind the netcode work of that period, which otherwise sits in the record as unexplained tuning.

Why they went to E3 and Cologne

Two trips in June 2017, both aimed at the game's competitive future. Part of the team spent the week of 9 to 16 June at E3 promoting the game and networking with other studios and publishers, and ESL invited the studio to ESL One Cologne 2017 as VIPs representing Battalion 1944 (archived studio alpha recap, page dated 31 May 2017, captured 23 July 2017, read 2 October 2026). The stated purpose of the second trip was to get in front of professional teams, organisations and players in order to "help secure Battalion 1944's future as a competitive title".

That line is the most concrete competitive ambition anywhere in this record, and it is dated to the alpha period — months before the game had a competitive mode of its own. Nothing read for this page says how the conversations went.

One hire came out of that push. In June 2017 the studio brought in a former competitive Call of Duty 4 Promod player, credited at the time as Phantasy, to test the game internally and to make the studio's own video updates. The stated reason was twofold: that his knowledge of the competitive scene would help iron out the bugs that hurt competitive play, and that he could explain the game to the community better than the developers could (archived studio update, page dated 30 June 2017, captured 23 July 2017, read 3 October 2026).

The ranking system behind those ambitions was kept off the record deliberately. BattleRank was described as the most advanced part of the build, designed in consultation with former professional Call of Duty players, and the studio said it would not publish the details during 2017 on the grounds that a ranking system is easy to copy. It offered the same reason for holding features back that it gave at the top of the same update: material published early can be taken by someone else (archived studio development update, captured 27 May 2017, read 3 October 2026).

The wear system, and the engine behind it

The cosmetic system had a name and a rule set. The studio called it The War Torn System and described it as a live wear system tied to rank: at rank one the uniform, equipment, weapon and character's face are all clean, and as you level up the gear becomes worn, scratched and battered, you earn etchings to carve into your weapon with the rarest reserved for the highest ranks, and war paint used by units such as the D-Day Pathfinders becomes unlockable (archived studio weapons page, page dated 11 April 2017, captured 20 September 2017, read 2 October 2026).

The design purpose is the part worth quoting, because it is about reading a battlefield rather than about colours: "at a distance you can visually see a player's ranking or status, without using an icon or number above the players head". The art rule attached to it is just as blunt — "Do not expect to see a pink tiger camo M1 Garand!", because the team made art only from reliable reference images — and both lines are attributed in the same piece to Joe Brammer, the studio's executive producer. On the engine, the studio's own development update says a Pathfinders warpaint image was "Rendered in game engine Unreal Engine 4" (archived studio development update, captured 27 May 2017, read 2 October 2026), which is the studio naming its own engine rather than a job advertisement implying it.

How each claim on this page is labelled

This site sorts every conclusion into one of three buckets. On this page the buckets matter more than usual, because the underlying pages no longer exist on the live web and a reader ought to know exactly how thin the ground is.

Still not on any official record

The gaps are part of the answer here, so they are written down rather than left out:

• The game's present status. We could not establish whether Battalion 1944 is still sold or still running, and this page does not guess. The studio's original site no longer serves its pages.
• Any measured result of the alpha v0.2 changes. No retention figure, no duel-win statistic, no before-and-after gameplay measurement appears in the notes.
• Whether the 2017 design formula reached the released build. The notes describe intent during an invitation-only test; no later document we could read says what survived.
• A public explanation of the changes. The alpha note was written for testers under an agreement that barred publishing outside the studio's own channels, so the reasoning above exists only in that captured page.
• The publisher and the funding structure. The design pages read here describe the game rather than the business around it; that half of the record is on the launch page, which carries the Kickstarter totals, the studio's own £100,000 pledge and the Square Enix Collective partnership.

Why this page is not on the three WARDOGS sites

The three sites that cover WARDOGS in depth all start their coverage with WARDOGS. The field-guide site is an official changelog and FAQ for the current game, the wiki is an item database with several thousand stat pages and no editorial articles, and the community hub tracks weapons, economy, servers and patches. None of the three looks backwards at the studio's previous shooter, which is the ground this page stands on — and which is only recoverable through archive captures of pages their owner stopped serving (all three read 30 September 2026).