Now that Vanguard’s Multiplayer Reveal is over and done with there were a bunch of things I wanted to comment on. Keep in mind all of this simply from observing the event itself and some of the game play afterwards. Whether for good or for bad it’s simply easier to compare Vanguard to Modern Warfare 2019. It just seems like they took the base game, modified it to fit their needs, and skinned it for World War 2. This isn’t a bad thing. After all you could make the same case for World at War and the a lot of the original Black Ops. Those games are often ranked at the top of player favorites along side their original run Modern Warfare counterparts and is arguable what put Treyarch on the map.

Multiplayer

• 20 maps at launch and it sounds like all (or most) will be available in traditional Multiplayer.

This is fantastic. I don’t think we’ve had this many maps at launch since The Old Days.

• Combat Pacing

It seems like “Tactical” is what they’re using for the traditional 6v6 experience and “Blitz” just makes everything the equivalent of Shipment. I’m definitely willing to give some of the4se new pacing a try and I think it brings something fresh and new to traditional multiplayer. What’s nice is that those who just want all Shipment all the time can simply play Blitz but that Tactical will be misread as an invitation to Camp COD. Hopefully that isn’t the case with the middle setting being something akin to 10v10 in MW2019. My fear is that it will ultimately split the community but with crossplay that doesn’t seem to be an issue as the player poole that was spaced out between all three major platforms is one giant player pool for the most part.

• Regiments seems to be back as “clans” and let’s hope Happy Hour is too.

Hooray for a daily hour of double xp.

• Reactive (Destructible) Environments

So not every surface is destructible, which is fine. Looking at video it seems that it can be used strategically and not just to create holes in windows and knock down walls to create sight lines. One of the things mentioned, and this has me interested even more, is that conceptually it can used to force out opponents (or used to force you out of a spot). This is, at least for me, why I use Thermite in MW2019. Throw it up in a window or wherever it’s needed to either pin or push out an enemy to be shot. If it’s done right they have the choice to either burn or let me kill them. It’ll be interesting to see this potentially play out with windows, walls, doors, and crates being shot away. This is one of the features I’m most looking forward and for this exact reason. Oh, you wanna hide behind that create? Let me chip away at it and make you come out.

While we’re talking about doors it seems you can tac sprint through the walls that are destructible but doing so in the alpha felt… soft. It felt nothing like busting through a door in MW2019. Maybe this was because of the sound in the alpha but the walls felt like they lacked the heft of the doors in MW2019. Busting through a big door in MW2019 at times feels heavy and even the regular wood ones feels like its got a little heft to it like a door should. Even if the wooden doors didn’t feel as heavy, the sound they made felt violent. Like busting through a door should.

• Mounting your weapon is back and this time it brought it’s friend Blindfire.

I’ll say this up front: I was a huge fan of weapon mounting in MW2019. It almost immediately became a part of my play style. Being able to check a corner before crossing or round it became invaluable. Using it correctly allowed you to move from cover to cover so much faster. So I’m really interested to try out this new “Blindfire” mechanic. From what it sounds like it will enable you to peek over or around cover and essentially hip fire. I’m thinking of Gears of War, or a game like it, where you’re in cover and fire over it without aiming. Just in first person. Being in cover will allow you to peek over and given this is a first person shooter that kind of is a necessity. The thing that makes this even more interesting is that you can go from Blindfire to mount and back. The thing that bothers me though is that it seems like you can slide along the edge of whatever your mounted on. That might just be a little too much. At least in Modern Warfare if you were mounted you may have been a smaller target but you were stationary so long as you were mounted. Enabling mobility while mounted might be a little too much. Then again, it’s not like you’re stationary when you head glitched in the older games.

• Gunsmith and Create-A-Class

SO there will be ten, yes 10, attachments per weapon. I’m going to assume this includes some kind of weapon perk or perhaps multiple weapon perks. My biggest concern of course is balance. The talk of there being weapon class specific perks that adapt the weapons to do particular things like the mentioned LMG with an SMG’s rate of fire. This starts to feel like the way they handled create a class at the launch of WW2 where only certain regiments (and regiments we mean class types) had certain abilities. For example Airborne was the only one really able to use a sniper or really SMGs. That was… Not Good. It was needlessly complex and restrictive. You know something is bad when it gets completely overhauled mid cycle and I’m really hoping Sledge learned from that whole mess.

I was going to make perks a whole separate spot but they really only talked about the one: Piercing Vision. This perk in and of itself scared the hell out of me. My biggest concern around this one is balance. Not even counter right now, just balance. From what we saw it looks like a snapshot grenade from Modern Warfare. I have a few questions about this though:

1. How is this triggered? Is it literally every round through destructible walls and things?

But most importantly

2. What’s the balance and/or counter to this thing?

With the snapshot grenade it was balanced in two ways:

1. It was equipment. Therefore it was only allowed to be used once per spawn. Use it early and survive for a time and you couldn’t use it again until respawn.

2. The Battle Hardened perk hid you from being seen but not detected. If a player was using Battle Hardened you would simply get hit markers with the perk icon but no yellow glow.

This makes the snapshot grenade balanced in that you have think before using it. Do I really need to use this here? If you used it and you need it you’re shit out of luck and too bad. If you did use it, and the player was running Battle Hardened, you know they’re there but… where? You still had to guess. As a perk it’s one of those things that’s always on. This just looks like a legal wall hack and that is not ok and this gives me a ton of concern.

Given where we’ve been before with Sledgehammer and the Divisions system from WW2, I am very skeptical. My trust with them is shaky at best. If there is anything that can ruin a Call of Duty title it’s a bad class system and Divisions was it. My fear is that we’re going to end up with something similar to Divisions built on top of Gunsmith. The problem with Divisions was that it was overly and needlessly complicated. I get that they wanted to not only shake things up a little and have their own system, like Treyarch with Pick Ten, but even after the revamp it didn’t quite work. One thing about Call of Duty is that it should be easy to pick up and hard to master. Create a Class from COD4 through BO2 had this in spades. Pick Ten was the same way but added a little extra flexibility by using a point allotment instead of forcing you into certain things. Ghosts one upped this by removing wildcards and giving a point value to each perk instead of limiting you to the classic three or six with the Perk Greed wildcard.

• Lighting

Ok, let’s talk about graphics for a second. The lighting in the alpha looked pretty good for what it was and I wont complain given that it was a build probably from June or July. Seeing how they’re taking lighting into account with foliage, as with the example with the leaf, this game is going to at least look spectacular. One of the best things to come out of Modern Warfare 2019 was it’s lighting system and generally how well optimized it was for using heavy RTX. My hope is that MW2019 was the floor and Vanguard just gets better and makes more use of things that maybe Infinity Ward either didn’t have time to get into MW2019 or simply didn’t have the understanding to at the time. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they were able to do.

I do have a question on the atmosphere stuff: is that random or are those different versions of maps? I’m gonna be really bummed if it isn’t random. The hype of 20 launch maps will vanish fast.

• Operators and Operator Progression

Oh boy. This I dont get. I’m not even going to get into the whole “historically accurate” thing. I’ll just say these few things:

1. At first I was ok with the no factions thing but then I realized how dumb Team A vs Team B is. I mean… c’mon. This is just lazy. Maybe I’m wrong and it’ll feel better when I can actually give it a try. I’m open but but….

2. Did we not learn our fucking lesson from the Cold War beta? We’re really only going to have one st of operators to cover both sides in multiplayer?

Am I understanding this right? One set of operators to cover both teams? No equivalent to Coalition vs Allegiance? NATO vs Warsaw? How about just Allies vs Axis? I’m pretty sure we can find a proper way to make that work. I really don’t want to question friend or foe because the opposing operator looks exactly the same as mine. Oh you poor hardcore players. My heart goes out to you if this sticks.

The Operator Progression just seems like a way to get you to use the very limited number of Operators but hopefully it’ll replace the concept of operator challenges that we have now. I don’t mind doing them but the Warzone specific ones have got to go. Specifically the ones that rely on other people.

Warzone

• Warzone Pacific

It’ll be nice to get out of Verdansk. I was under the impression that this was to replace Verdansk but now I’m curious how the integration is going to work and if Verdansk will still hang around under the Modern Warfare and Cold War or if this will be a complete shift. I have a feeling it’s going to be tied to Vanguard like Verdansk is tied to MW2019. Tons of asset sharing and no way to remove it on PC. While it’s annoying to have it take up all that extra space it’ll be for the better. Tighter integration with Warzone will be better for weapon integration and balance. It won’t end up being the disaster that the Cold War weapons always seem to end up being while Raven has to essentially fix them for Warzone constantly. It should be just as simple and smooth as it was for Modern Warfare.

Over all there is a lot that I’m looking forward to. It’ll be nice to finally move away from Verdansk after two years. It’s really nice to be back on IW 8. But there are some design decisions that make me wonder what Sledgehammer is thinking. I know this is just thoughts after a 30 minute reveal and I have yet to get my hands on a beta¹ but some of these just sound insane. I’m legitimately concerned that they learned nothing from the WW2 Divisions debacle and are going to repeat it. And even with Beta access there are only a limited amount of options we’ll have. Unfortunately we won’t know the full details and may not truly know if this system works until launch.

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