THE HOTZONE Ep. 1 "The Wipe": Bulkhead's new podcast

The first episode of THE HOTZONE (70 min) with Joe (Studio Lead), Pete (Lead Designer), Mark (Technical Designer) and Tim (Creative Director), boiled down to what's worth knowing. They say several times that a lot of it is "raw" and not final, so anything marked undecided really is undecided.

🔴 TL;DR: changes for the stuff people are annoyed about

• S2 too fast / "tanks everywhere" → S2 ends early, after roughly 4–5 weeks instead of 6–8, with S3 content pulled forward. No instant wipe.
• Constant resets → No more monthly seasons. They're moving to ~3-month seasons with a smaller mid-season update.
• The progression system itself → They call it a stopgap MVP. The real system, Intel, is targeted for ~Q2 2027, with persistent skill trees after that.
• Infrared rangefinder/binoculars are OP → Tim, Pete and Mark all lean towards removing or reworking it. Undecided. It won't be in the new limited gear mode either way.
• "I miss the early game" → New limited gear mode that recreates the low/mid game, open to everyone.
• Too many drivers → Driver share went from 9% to 44%. They say that's not sustainable, but no fix decided yet.
• New map → Half bowl, half flat, with a multi-floor hospital in the middle and lots of verticality. The team loves it.

What went wrong

Blue/Lone Star XP bonus. Blue got +2.5% XP (under 500 XP a match) to fix its "weak side" reputation, even though the Bakarani spawn issue was already fixed. The best S1 players all jumped to Blue, it hit a ~67% win rate, and games stalled because everyone waited for a Blue slot. It was pulled after ~10h. Their take: obvious in hindsight, because players always take the bonus no matter how small. They say they won't do that again.

Early tank and the driver exploit. The new, weaker tank unlocked at level 20, which was reachable in about 10 hours. A driver progression exploit only affected fewer than 400 players, but spread over ~400 servers that meant ~40,000 people saw a tank, and tanks were in ~30–40% of matches. So it felt like "tanks everywhere". Lesson: putting something that visible early isn't worth it.

Progression too fast at the top. S1 had ~3.4M players and S2 ~1.5M, and the ones who came back are the good players. The top 25% leveled 2.4x faster than in S1, and stomp matches got 12% shorter. The big admission: even if they'd changed nothing, S2 would still have been too fast, because the system itself is broken.

Communication. The ~10h "bonus removed, exploit fixed" post landed just as people got home, so a lot of them read it as "everyone else already got ahead". Several of them call the Saturday announcement that the next season was coming early the biggest mistake: it made people ask why they should invest in S2 at all.

Panic and leadership. The data showed good retention and median players having fun, while the loud few thousand were furious. Design and marketing stopped trusting each other over the weekend. Joe takes the blame ("that's where my leadership failed"). They had no plan for this much success (1M pre-orders, then 3M+ players), had ~700k in the bank against ~600k/month costs, and ended up with everyone reacting instead of one person handling the community.

Too much content. Scared of not having enough (a leftover from their Battalion days), they overstuffed S2 and quality dropped. Example: they knew the .50 cal on the Wolf and as a buildable was OP and shipped it anyway. "We're on the treadmill and the treadmill's on max."

Steam reviews. Once recent reviews hit Mixed, Steam stops promoting the game, so new sales basically stopped that weekend. They read out reviews that contradict each other: one negative because they're wiping early, another because they're not wiping early enough.

What they learned

• Players always take the shortest path to any bonus.
• Perception scales differently than data: 400 tanks looks like tanks in every game.
• The loudest players aren't all the players. Median players and their non-gamer friends liked S2 more.
• Don't talk about the next season right after launching one.
• Less content, done properly.
• Live service is much harder than they expected.
• They don't want to overcorrect and be dictated to just because they're afraid of the backlash.
• "Players are great at finding problems, bad at solutions."

Progression, now and planned

Now: an MVP modeled on Arma 3 King of the Hill, minus perks. In S1, millions got stuck at levels 9 and 14 (~1.8M quit at 14), and only ~70k reached level 35. Roles really come online around level 20, which is why S2 sped up that range and moved some power earlier in the trees. Career level is meaningless as it stands: 74h of grinding two roles and 3h of leveling every role to 12 can both get you level 3 armor, and the scoreboard just shows "70" either way.

🔴 Intel (~Q2 2027):

• A seasonal resource that resets every season.
• Earned at a set daily pace. No hard cap, but heavy players progress more slowly.
• Catch-up built in: unused allowance builds up, so weekend players don't fall behind.
• You spend it on what you want. No delivering pallets for 20 hours to get the tank. If you only want the MK22, you unlock the MK22.
• No linear unlock chain means weapons can be balanced more evenly, and gear can rotate in and out each season.

🔴 Persistent skills (after Intel): role XP turns into skill points for a skill tree per role. Small passives (for example faster ladder climbing) plus bigger "capstones" that change how you play. It never gets wiped. "You're building your WARDOG and it lasts forever."

They're aware everyone suddenly wants "horizontal progression". Their answer: that's the goal, they just haven't had the time or money yet.

Gear and balance

🔴 Infrared rangefinder, the live debate.

• Tim: "I would back it out." It's way too strong, especially seeing through rain and fog.
• Pete: agrees, but loves the fantasy and the spotting system.
• Mark: it loses 400–500 m of range in rain, but it goes through trees and should be blocked by foliage. Shorter battery life won't fix it. Final answer: remove or rework.
• Other ideas: a rare world spawn, for example on top of a tower.

Weapons. 7.62x51 is now ".308" and was toned down to make room for .338 as a proper sniper round. In S2 the AK became free, the MP5 and Judge came earlier, the PKM moved to level 15 and popular guns moved later.

Vehicles. For the driver problem they floated two options: give the logistics role more identity, or change where tanks sit in progression. Undecided. Havoc spam (shoot one down and the same guy pulls another a minute later) has no solution yet. They think fuel is underused and could be part of the answer.

Limits. Mostly a no. Hard caps like "one rocket pod heli per team" create endless edge cases (what happens when it's crashed and abandoned?) and kill cool moments like someone rolling out with 20 tanks. They only step in when something breaks basically every match, which so far has meant the rangefinder and crates at spawn (new players were blowing all their money on marked-up crates). They nearly capped hot zone magnets at one per FOB, but Tim stopped it. They're more expensive and need more fuel instead.

Balance philosophy. Balance is a wobbling tightrope, not a flat line. New stuff can be a bit strong for a while. Losing is OK. It's rock-paper-scissors: no RPG and there's a tank? Stay quiet.

How things will run from here

• A vlog on S2 and S3+ is coming next week.
• More podcasts if people like the format.
• ~3-month seasons, fewer but better-tested changes.
• They held their first all-hands since release to set one clear plan.
• The game is $40 and the price will go up over time.
• Some context: the studio was about to be shut down last December. They bought it back, partnered with Team17, and shipped a smaller Early Access version instead of the full vision that was planned for 2028.