Call of Duty: Vanguard

• 1. Introduction

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  Call of Duty: Vanguard reached players on the 5th of November 2021, the 18th main game in the Call of Duty series. Sledgehammer Games built it and Activision published it. It launched on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

  In the United States it went on to be the best-selling game of 2021. Yet by the middle of 2022, the publisher itself was admitting disappointment. How does a hit end up described as a miss?

  The answer runs through a studio trying to rebuild itself, and a Second World War story about the birth of special forces. It also takes in a publisher that quietly stepped back from its own game, and a zombie mode that drew fire from players and critics alike.

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• 2. Task Force Vanguard

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  In June 1942, Lieutenant Wade Jackson of the U.S. Navy flew a Douglas SBD Dauntless at the Battle of Midway, with tail gunner Mateo Hernandez behind him. Together they destroyed two Japanese aircraft carriers. Jackson is one of five soldiers the campaign follows through separate fronts of the war.

  The story does not run in order. It jumps between years, and each jump introduces a soldier whose war looks nothing like the others. Private Lucas Riggs is an Australian demolitionist among the Rats of Tobruk in August 1941. In October 1942, at the Second Battle of El Alamein, he defies a British major's orders to retake a hill. He then punches the major, and faces prison for it.

  Private Polina Petrova, a Red Army nurse, watches the Wehrmacht invade Stalingrad in August 1942. Her father Boris is executed in front of her. She escapes with her brother Misha and Soviet partisans, and her sniping earns her the nickname Lady Nightingale. She hunts the German commander Leo Steiner. In January 1943 she and Misha try to assassinate him, and Misha is badly wounded. He sacrifices himself so she can get away.

  Sergeant Arthur Kingsley, a British paratrooper, takes part in Operation Tonga in June 1944. His unit helps destroy the Merville Gun Battery and several bridges ahead of the Normandy invasion. There he befriends Sergeant Richard Webb, who becomes his right-hand man. Jackson, meanwhile, is shot down and captured during the Bougainville campaign in November 1943. The 93rd Infantry Division rescues him and Hernandez, then helps them obtain an Aichi D3A to retake the island.

  A Special Operations Executive captain named Carver Butcher gathers Kingsley, Webb, Petrova, Jackson, Riggs and a Yugoslav partisan named Milos Novak. Butcher makes them the first special operations task force, with the callsign Vanguard. Kingsley leads it. Their first target is a secret Nazi program they have yet to understand.

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• 3. Project Phoenix

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  In April 1945, the Vanguard squad hijacks a train bound for Hamburg. They are looking for intelligence on Project Phoenix, a secret Nazi program run by an SS officer named Hermann Freisinger. The mission goes wrong aboard a Nazi submarine. German soldiers capture everyone except Jackson, who stays hidden, and Freisinger beats Novak to death.

  The prisoners are delivered to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Freisinger hands their interrogation to his underling, Jannick Richter. Jackson is caught later while trying to steal a plane at Berlin Tempelhof Airport. To break the team's spirit, Richter executes Webb.

  Richter does not know what Project Phoenix is for, or that Freisinger is behind it. He questions Petrova and Riggs about how Steiner and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel connect to Freisinger. From the answers he works out the truth. Project Phoenix was a coup attempt meant to install Freisinger as the new Führer of a Fourth Reich.

  Berlin is under siege by the Red Army, and Adolf Hitler is dead by suicide. In the chaos, Riggs breaks out of interrogation and frees the squad. Kingsley kills Richter to avenge Webb. The team chases Freisinger to Tempelhof, captures him, and burns him alive.

  The four survivors board Freisinger's plane and find German documents describing covert Nazi operations around the world. Kingsley picks a destination from them. He orders Jackson to fly to Project Aggregat, a secret V2 rocket facility.

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• 4. Caldera Island

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  In December 1944, Captain Butcher begins overseeing Operation Vulcan. It is a top-secret mission to track down Axis soldiers and scientists who fled to the South Pacific. This storyline belongs to the multiplayer and Warzone side of the game, and it carries on long after the campaign's war ends.

  Butcher sends Task Force Trident to Caldera Island, but anti-aircraft fire downs their plane. Three Trident members end up stranded away from Butcher. He finds the entrance to a Nazi bunker on the beach where he crash-landed. The intelligence recovered there points to a new chemical weapon, code-named Nebula V.

  Butcher follows the trail to the Swiss Alps with Task Force Yeti. The team storms a Nazi fortress to recover the weapon. They fail to stop the fortress commander from releasing the Nebula V gas. The team barely escapes as the gas swallows the building.

  The Nazis then begin deploying Nebula V across the world, hitting cities including Paris and London, and Caldera itself. In March 1951, Butcher sends Task Force Harpy to Caldera to intercept a Nazi arms convoy. They find a radio broadcasting a strange primal sound. Butcher fears that Nebula V has awakened something powerful nearby. The island eventually becomes the battleground for the kaiju Godzilla and the gorilla Kong.

  Time passes, and the operators under Butcher turn to mercenary work, chasing Nazi gold and other riches. In 1976 Butcher leads Task Force Immortal to the crash site of a helicopter carrying a gold shipment. He meets hostility from Kingsley, who now leads his own mercenary team. Some time later, villains from earlier games, among them Raul Menendez, Khaled Al-Asad, He "Seraph" Zhen-Zhen and Gabriel Rorke, arrive on Caldera.

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• 5. Rebuilding Sledgehammer

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  Before Vanguard, Sledgehammer Games had made two Call of Duty titles: Advanced Warfare in 2014 and WWII in 2017. After WWII, the studio lost its co-founders and directors, Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey. It then went through a rebuilding of its organisational structure.

  Studio Head Aaron Halon described that period in an interview with VentureBeat. He said the team loved its legacy but also wanted to think about the future of the studio. He added that Sledgehammer was "proud of the decisions we've made along the way" that led to Vanguard.

  The release schedule itself had been reshuffled. Since 2012, Call of Duty had followed a three-year rotation among Infinity Ward, Treyarch and Sledgehammer. Sledgehammer was expected to lead the 2020 entry alongside Raven Software. Conflicts of interest between the two studios shifted the project to Treyarch, which produced Black Ops Cold War that year.

  Activision confirmed the new plan during its first-quarter earnings call in May 2021. Sledgehammer would lead the next game, due in the fourth quarter of 2021. Daniel Alegre, Activision Blizzard's president and chief operating officer, called it a "built-for-next-generation experience". Sledgehammer also confirmed the news on its official Twitter account.

  The game runs on an upgraded version of the IW 8.0 engine that powered Modern Warfare. Its visuals draw partly on photogrammetry and new volumetric lighting techniques. A damage layer system makes surfaces react differently to bullet impacts, which supports the destructible environments the studio promoted.

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• 6. Mechanics and Modes

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  The campaign borrows from Modern Warfare. Players can mount a held weapon on flat surfaces, interact with doors and perform takedowns. Vanguard adds options for a more tactical approach: blind firing from behind cover, breaking through destructible parts of the environment, and climbing walls to open new routes to an objective.

  Multiplayer introduced a mode called Champion Hill. It succeeds Gunfight, the 2v2 arena mode from Modern Warfare and Black Ops Cold War. Champion Hill is a squad-based, round-robin deathmatch tournament in which players try to survive as long as possible. In Season 2, a large-scale mode called Arms Race arrived. Two teams of 12 players fight to capture or destroy five bases, earning cash from kills and objectives to buy custom loadouts and killstreaks.

  A new series feature called Combat Pacing lets players steer which modes they land in. It offers three pre-defined filters, each favoring a different playstyle. The Gunsmith system returns, now joined by a Caliber system. Different ammunition types make maps more destructible and reactive.

  As with Cold War, Vanguard connects to Warzone. Progress, weapons, operators and cosmetics carry across both titles, alongside the existing Modern Warfare and Cold War items. Multiplayer supports cross-platform play, as every installment since 2019 has, and works across eighth and ninth generation consoles.

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• 7. Zombies and Its Troubles

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  The cooperative Zombies mode came from Treyarch, working with Sledgehammer. It expands the Dark Aether story and serves as a prologue to Black Ops Cold War. At launch the game offered one map, Der Anfang. It blends round-based survival with the objective-based play of Outbreak and Onslaught, two modes introduced in Cold War.

  Cold War's Essence and Salvage currencies return, along with Dark Aether field upgrades and classic items such as perks and the Pack-a-Punch machine. A new feature, the Altar of Covenants, lets players buy randomized buffs each round, which varies how a build plays out.

  Updates added a main quest to Der Anfang, along with new Covenants and field upgrades. A second map, Terra Maledicta, arrived in February 2022 with the Season 2 update. In April 2022 Activision announced classic round-based maps. The first, a remake of the World at War map Shi no Numa, came in Season 4. The second, The Archon, came in Season 5 and proved to be the last map for the mode.

  Players and critics received Zombies poorly, complaining of thin content next to earlier versions. Luke Winkie of IGN gave it 5 out of 10, saying it had "little imagination beyond bigger damage numbers sparking out of the heads of its undead". Richard Warren of GameRant pointed to reused multiplayer assets, missing Wonder Weapons and a lack of Easter eggs.

  A worse problem surfaced after launch. Players found pages of the Quran scattered on the floor of Der Anfang, some of them bloodstained. Activision removed them and apologised on Twitter, writing that "There was content insensitive to Muslims included in the game, and it has been removed."

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• 8. Reveal and Release

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  In August 2021, insider sources leaked details about Vanguard, including its editions and the content of its reveal trailer. Call of Duty's official accounts acknowledged the leak in what the source describes as a humorous way, then began teasing the real reveal. The first teaser appeared inside Warzone itself. Winning a Battle Royale match could end with Polina Petrova sniping you from afar during the extraction cutscene.

  A week later the title was announced, together with a Warzone event called The Battle of Verdansk. Players worked together to take down a train, then tried to escape while World War II planes dropped bombs. The reveal trailer played at the end and was then posted to YouTube and other sites. On the 25th of August, at Gamescom, Sledgehammer showed an extended playthrough of a mission called Stalingrad Summer, in which Petrova searches for a way home after an aerial attack. On the 7th of September, a live broadcast of nearly 30 minutes featured creative director Greg Reisdorf, lead designer Zach Hodson and associate art director Matt Abbott, who explained the multiplayer.

  Viewers noticed something missing from the reveal trailer: Activision's name. The trailer said "Call of Duty presents" instead of "Activision presents", and the publisher appeared only in small copyright print. Publications linked the choice to the California lawsuit against the company over sexual harassment. An Activision spokesman told journalist Stephen Totilo it was "a creative choice that reflects how Vanguard represents the next major installment in the franchise".

  An open multiplayer beta ran in September 2021 with five maps and playlists including Team Deathmatch, Domination, Kill Confirmed and Search and Destroy. It also featured the new Patrol and Champion Hill modes, and reaching Level 20 earned a weapon blueprint. A tie-in comic, announced at New York Comic Con on the 10th of October 2021, gave attendees a free first issue starring Petrova. On the 4th of November it went free online. The game launched the next day, and pre-orders on every edition unlocked Arthur Kingsley as an operator for Cold War and Warzone.

  Post-launch content stayed free, with the battle pass and in-game store providing revenue. Crossovers followed. An Attack on Titan bundle landed on the 20th of January 2022, with an operator skin based on Levi Ackerman. A later bundle drew on Reiner Braun's Armored Titan form. Snoop Dogg became a playable character on the 19th of April 2022, after voicing a multiplayer announcer in Call of Duty: Ghosts in 2014. A MonsterVerse crossover brought Godzilla, Kong and Mechagodzilla items. The Terminator collaboration added T-800 and T-1000 operators, and The Umbrella Academy inspired bundles based on Hazel and Cha-Cha.

  Metacritic summarized the critical response as "mixed or average reviews". Simon Cardy of IGN gave Vanguard 7 out of 10. He praised a highly polished campaign but said its brief length and lack of variety kept it from the classic war cinema it aimed to match. Clement Goh of CGMagazine also gave it 7 out of 10, calling the campaign and multiplayer fun but describing duller Zombies.

  The sharpest criticism targeted the story's politics. Yussef Cole of Polygon argued that its progressive lens showed superficial diversity and tokenism. He said the game whitewashed both history and the workplace practices behind Activision Blizzard's lawsuit. In his view it was a "mythmaking vehicle" for the Western allies. John Walker of Kotaku wrote that it never considered how poorly it rewrites the reality of marginalized people in the war. He called the graphics "astonishing" but said they were "all for absolutely nothing", and he found less player freedom than in 2003's Call of Duty.

  The sales story was just as uneven. According to NPD Group, Vanguard topped the charts in both the United States and the United Kingdom in November 2021. British sales were down 40% from Black Ops Cold War. In Japan, the PlayStation 4 version sold 28,321 copies in its first week, ranking fourteenth among retail games. The PlayStation 5 version sold 12,754 copies and ranked fifth.

  In May 2022, Activision stated that the game had missed its own sales expectations. It blamed the World War II setting and a "lack of innovation".

  Awards bodies still took notice. The Visual Effects Society Awards listed it for outstanding visual effects in a real-time project. The 25th D.I.C.E. Awards listed it for online game of the year, animation and art direction. At the 18th British Academy Games Awards it appeared in the animation, audio achievement and multiplayer categories. Laura Bailey, who voiced Petrova, was listed for performer in a supporting role. In 2023 the soundtrack appeared at the 65th Grammy Awards for best score soundtrack for video games.

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