Call of Duty: Vanguard may be a necessary throwback

Finally, at the end of last week Activision unveiled the future of its main series, Call of Duty, after months of rumors, doubts, denials, whispered advances to fuel the hype. Call of Duty: Vanguard-releasing November 5, 2021- will be the return with great fanfare of one of the kings of the war-based FPS, and it will be a return to the World War II setting.

The choice is no wonder, both because the developer is Sledgehammer (father of CoD: WWII) and because the saga, over the course of its twenty-year career, has accustomed us to a succession of games that move from one era to another and from one mood to another. One thing, however, could strike those who have also casually followed the saga from year to year: from what we see, to confirm the rise of CoD Vanguard could rewind the hands of time and return to ride features that the series seemed to have put in the attic.

Everything we know (more or less) about Vanguard

Although the whole operation does not seem distant from those of the past, the reasons of interest to look at Vanguard may not be lacking at all.

First, why Vanguard will be the first episode of the series to come out after Activision's all-in with that Warzone moloch, allowing us to understand what the role of the battle royale will be in CoD's communication strategy.

If we think that the first teaser of the game was projected right inside Warzone, we already have a small but satisfying clue, suggesting how WZ will be treated by Activision as a kind of central communication hub for the community. We also know that Vanguard will keep and re-propose many hits from the latest CoDs, from the weight inside our consoles (please, it's really off the scale) to the revival of the famous “Zombie Mode”.

On the other hand, Vanguard will also be the first Activision (-Blizzard) blockbuster to be released a few weeks after the explosion of the "toxic environment scandal" in the parent company of WoW, and again we already have a clue to the effects, namely the total lack of the name of the multinational from the trailer.

Finally - and here we get into the meat - what hits the players is the fact that it seems to adopt an “innovative” approach to an all too classic setting like the Second World War. From what we know, in fact, Vanguard will put us in the shoes of elite soldiers of all the armies in the field, grappling with complex operations. In the presentation of the game reference is made to the famous and heroic Soviet snipers, and we know that other fractions of the campaign will see us in action in North Africa and - listen, listen - Pacific, allowing the player to jump from one point of the globe to another exactly as it did in games over ten years ago such as World at war.

Back to the past (in all senses)

Those who chew on the genre could guess one thing, a small fact: we could find ourselves facing a small break in the narrative and gameplay scheme of the game, passing from the epic and field campaign optics we saw in WWII to a more "behind enemy lines", with small special forces units trained to eliminate key enemy targets or destroy secret bases.

So let's expect (yes, I could play something) very small groups of characters, perhaps all with a well-defined character and able to build a compelling story, replaced by the large clusters of NPCs driven by artificial intelligence.

Why can all this make historical players of the series smile? Because it represents a discreet change of course for a series that until WWII had pursued a cinematic and superheroic representation of war, but above all always looking for a gigantism typical of films like Saving Private Ryan or, looking at Modern Warfare, Black Hawk Dawn. It was no coincidence that WWII itself had a new and spectacular reproduction of the landing a Omaha Beach, which inevitably paid homage to the unforgettable Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.

However, before technology allowed it definitively, or more or less before the second or third episode, despite wonderful choral sequences such as the arrival of the Soviets in Stalingrad (CoD 1), CoD was inevitably a game that mostly featured small groups of military infiltrators, exactly how Vanguard could be. Why then go back to the past?

Because, paradoxically, the once visionary goal achieved by CoD, create a game with dozens of soldiers fighting each other simultaneously and in the center the player as the usual hero-by-chance-with-heart-of-gold, it may no longer be that interesting to bring to screens.

Courses and appeals

Glad to be proved wrong (but, I'm sorry, the trailer gave me that impression), but the impression that the first news give to me is that the genre of historical FPS has really come to a saturation point from a creative point of view, with the end of a life cycle (from real classic fps disguised as historical warfare, like the first MoH, to splendid reconstructions of pitched battles) and the beginning of another (with possible predominance of a smaller scale).

Let's not simply call it with the blaming term of “lack of ideas”, because CoD is not a brand that needs to live on innovative ideas, especially after the birth of the Warzone moloch. It still makes you smile as over the years the historical FPS has not managed to get out of its deeply rooted niche of structure, gameplay and themes, with the only exception perhaps of a brave Battlefield 1 set during the First World War of some intrepid indie based on historical periods difficult to transpose into a triple-a such as the Napoleonic wars or the American Civil War.

And if anyone rightly points out that single-player game campaigns like CoD are just business cards for the real centerpiece of the cake, multiplayer, then devil: have courage, stop serving soups that have been heated for twenty years, and below with the competitive mode.