First Thoughts On Vanguard

[AntiCheatAgent94]

Based on VERY limited game play (half a match) I can say...

"Well... Not bad.."

I didn't have time for any in-depth game play or setup.. I did notice that OPERATORS and LOADOUTS were all locked.. Is that because it's a FREE DEMO?? Seems like a pain in the arse that I can load out my chosen operator... Makes for a very limited analysis..

I felt that game play was more BOCW than MW/WZ... Fast and furious, running and gunning..

I look forward to more play to really flesh out my opinion..

But I am not sure I want to if I am locked to a single operator and no custom loadouts..

 

[Lavigne]

You get custom loadouts at rank 4, which you get to very quickly.

Sadly, for me, the MP is crippled by numerous and various issues that make it a thoroughly unpleasant experience. Ultimately I uninstalled the game. It’s a sad indictment that the best aspect of the game is the SP campaign, which is what, 4 hours?

 

[Skells]

It needs time, but I now absolutely love it.

I can only get a new COD every 2 years (I dislike BlackOps series), so I've been on MW for 2 years, so moving onto Vanguard was tough initially as the audio mix is not remotely set up for footsteps. You simply cannot hear enemy footsteps. You can hear your own, and your team's, but not your enemies, which is ridiculous.

However, it turns out I can still play/enjoy COD without having the (massive) help of hearing what direction the enemy is coming in.

Operators unlock with different challenges - some are quick and easy, others are not so, but this is what I am enjoying going through at the moment, all the operator challenges.

Gameplay, aside from the audio mix, is excellent.
Maps are generally good to very good.
£60 fror 2 years of fun is a no-brainer for me

 

[AntiCheatAgent94]

Vanguard might be my go-to COD while Plunder is in the closet.. I enjoy the fast pace and am actually able to get some kills and hold my own..

It's a plus that the cheaters haven't become prevalent in Vanguard yet as well..

 

[KeyboardDemon]

It's a plus that the cheaters haven't become prevalent in Vanguard yet as well..

That sounds like an invitation or maybe even a challenge.

There are anti-cheat measures that are supposedly on the way if they haven't already been implemented.

 

[gazster]

i had to do lot's of separate updates, the campaign was locked and later on there were short 2gb updates, i can imagine that's to fix any multiplayer issues, the campaign is ok but i struggled abit on tonga level where you start with no weapons, took a few tries at the start. multiplayer is ok but it has frozen my ps4 3 times now, so hopefully any updates would help with that.

 

[AntiCheatAgent94]

That sounds like an invitation or maybe even a challenge.

There are anti-cheat measures that are supposedly on the way if they haven't already been implemented.

Yea.. I'll be very interested to see if the new Anti Cheat lives up to the PR in WZ...

 

[KeyboardDemon]

Right so managed to get a few rounds of game play in, so here are my thoughts.

Technical.

The game played at Extreme settings and 2560x1440 with a reasonable 110fps to 130fps, possibly topping out at 150ish, but I am not sure if that 150 was in game or in switching from the game to the menu or vice versa.

Gameplay.

First, I played a few rounds of free-for-all, that was very fast, but not very fun. Spawn locations on this game seemed worse that Cold War, and despite getting a few double kills, I really didn't like the score streak progression and prefer the Cold War way of achieving score streak where the count doesn't reset after getting killed.

Maps.

Smaller maps than some of the MW maps, but I only got to sample a few, I did try a few rounds of Das House 24/7, but found I was pinned at my spawn point in nearly each game mostly by people on kill streaks. I didn't really see a map that made me want to go back and play it again.

Visuals.

Looks like MW on amphetamines laced with LSD, visually the pallettes have been changed and the gameplay is a bit faster but the models, soldiers and environment looks like MW but having travelled back in time a few decades.

Overall.

I don't think I will be getting this, I think MW does it better and I enjoy playing that more, plus I already have it.

 

[AntiCheatAgent94]

Yea, I am of the same opinion.. It's nice, but smacks too much of Run n Gun BOCW....

I think I will stick with MW or BOCW if PLUNDER is not available...

 

[KeyboardDemon]

Yea, I am of the same opinion.. It's nice, but smacks too much of Run n Gun BOCW....

I think I will stick with MW or BOCW if PLUNDER is not available...

When I started playing MW, I was instantly hooked on the game, I started playing during a free weekend and when I wasn't playing it, I was thinking about playing it, heck I was probably dreaming about playing when I eventually gave up game time to get some sleep.

I had a similar feeling with BOCW, but this is not giving me that feeling, I am not thinking about how I want to back and progress my weapons, or get better at playing it, instead the things that I am thinking include:

Why were they thinking when they changed the keyboard mapping so grenade, melee, and use/interact are all in different places? I tried setting them up to the way I like them, but it didn't work the way I expected it to after making those changes.

What have they done with the sound? Footsteps that are far away sound closer than footstep for soldiers that are close enough for me to melee, oh... if I could only figure out the key to melee them.

 

[Carlos]

I just tried out Vanguard on my PS4.

Its as good as the beta, but there's more glaring issues in it than beta.

I like how fast paced it is. The game is designed for run n' gun players. The map designs are not perfect, but I can see why it was designed that way.

However, graphics are poor. Its unacceptable. I thought they'd improve the graphics in the months following the beta. But they took at least 1 step backward. Because the game is employing "stream assets." And you'll realize this when the game shows items buffering, as it looks for assets. It was in the beta, during gameplay, but this is everything. I saw this in the gunsmith.

Hell, the game frozed on me. My button inputs were not registering, which is related to the reports of "guns not shooting" threads. I think the game is still streaming assets.

I can see that there's bottlenecks that at some point Activision needs to get away from cross gen games.

 

[AntiCheatAgent94]

Personally, I wish that Activision would have gone a bit into the future, rather than the past..

Not so far as Infinite Warfare.

Advanced Warfare was really good with an excellent story.. Loved Kevin Spacey in it..

But the game play was good and the tech was modern but not outlandishly so...

 

[freakdaddy64]

well i love vangaurd and think its awsome and have no issues as far as game play.

 

[panos]

can't play anymore .. battle.net play button pops a message saying ''you cant play call of duty vanguard yet''
Why ?

Also , why warzone is free which noone cares and not vanguard multiplayer ?

 

[gazster]

i finished the campaign earlier, i think 6 out of 10, i liked the lady nightingale parts but most of the game felt like playing battlefield where you do all sorts and i really miss world at war now, that game was good and even cod 2 big red one and number 3. to me vanguard felt a bit off.

 

[KeyboardDemon]

why warzone is free which noone cares and not vanguard multiplayer ?

You might not care much about Warzone, but it does have over 100-million players worldwide, even if only 10% of them were playing that would still be more than 10-million players.

As for why Warzone is free and not Vanguard?

I see Warzone as a playable ad for other CoD games as I tried Warzone shortly after it launched and was so impressed with how good it looked and how well it played on my (at the time) aging PC that I thought I would get MW for my PC. If it wasn't for the free game I would never have tried the paid game, and if it wasn't for MW then I wouldn't have bothered replacing my 8 year old PC with my current build, but I digress.

As for the second part of your question, why is Vanguard not free? Activision spend many millions of $$$s and the dev teams put thousands of hours into each CoD release and have done since 2007 and maybe longer. To support these games Activision then spend even more millions of $$$s to provide worldwide servers that allow their customers to play these games online. The business model being used here is investing into a product (in this case the CoD franchise) and then selling the product in order to generate profits as a return on their investment.

As consumers we can choose to buy it to play or not to buy it and miss out, so the bottom line is if you want to play it, buy it, so Activision, the devs, and all involved can get paid for their efforts.

 

[panos]

i finished the campaign earlier, i think 6 out of 10, i liked the lady nightingale parts but most of the game felt like playing battlefield where you do all sorts and i really miss world at war now, that game was good and even cod 2 big red one and number 3. to me vanguard felt a bit off.

how many hours is the campaign ?

 

[gazster]

it was like 5 to 6 hrs ish for campaign, i was playing on normal difficulty.

 

[panos]

you joking .... 5-6 hours campaign for a 60€ game ? Sledgehammer and activision are greedy companies , the dont understand the economical situation of each country....

 

[KeyboardDemon]

you joking .... 5-6 hours campaign for a 60€ game ? Sledgehammer and activision are greedy companies , the dont understand the economical situation of each country....

CoD has always been about the multiplayer game, at the start the campaign was there as a way for players to unlock operators and blueprints, then in MW'19 that was taken out. A lot of my friends haven't even started the campaign in MW and BOCW.

I thought the pricing on the game varied from region to region depending on the economy of the region, so if you live in a less affluent economy you should be seeing lower prices. I live in UK, so don't know if this is still the case.