To celebrate the launch of Call of Duty: Vanguard, we chat with the team behind the single-player campaign to see what makes it special.
If you’re a fan of Call of Duty, today is a big day. That’s because the latest entry in the series, Call of Duty: Vanguard has officially hit store shelves.
Back in the hands of series regular, Sledgehammer Games, this time the franchise takes things back to WII in an attempt to immerse you in some visceral combat on an unprecedented global scale. But while the multiplayer suite will inevitably become the bread and butter of many gamers, with Vanguard Sledgehammer is really hoping to push it’s solo offering.
“The story we put together, these beautiful vistas, these new biomes, these new characters, we have a really great cast,” praises Alexa Ray Corriea, the game’s Narrative Designer. They’re very diverse, they’re really awesome actors. Everything looks beautiful. The story’s really fast-paced and dramatic, and how it looks and how it sounds, I hope entices people to try the single player campaign.”
The narrative itself will follow four individuals whose individual actions helped turn the tide of World War II. There’s Private Lucas Riggs, Lieutenant Wade Jackson, Lieutenant Polina Petrova and Sergeant Arthur Kingsley. Throughout Vanguard’s campaign you will have the opportunity to live out the major moments that made each of these soldiers heroes. However you’ll also be tasked with putting an end to Project Phoenix, a fictional operation thought up by the remaining members of the Nazi party. Their goal: discover Hitler’s successor.
“People are really going to love the story that we’re telling and they’re really going to love our characters,” says Belinda Garcia, Vanguard’s Associate Narrative Designer. “We put a lot of love into our characters and thought into everything that they say to make them stand out and make them unique and have different perspectives that maybe weren’t highlighted before. I think players will really love that. I think they will think it’s absolutely beautiful because the game is gorgeous and they’ll be surprised at how much emotion we’re able to put into this campaign through the action moments of war, but also the quiet moments of war. I think there’ll be really intrigued with what we do with that.
Indeed Vanguard’s campaign seems set to not only try and delicately balance fact with fiction, but its reliance on big setpiece moments to keep shooter fans invested in the action.
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“The way that the campaign is structured, is very unique in a way that you will be able to experience these massive set pieces and these incredible settings and understand how they take part in the emotional beat of our characters, Garcia explains. “The settings and the moments that we chose to showcase in our campaign are very emotional. And they’re very character-driven, our whole story is very character driven. And I think it does have a really great balance between big set pieces and emotional beats. They’re mixed together in a very unique way that our players are going to be really excited to experience.”
“These big set pieces also are part of the core emotional journey of these characters, Corriea continues. “And when you’re writing characters for a game like this, I feel like they need, for Call of Duty, for a franchise like this you need to have those really big, high-octane, bombastic moments. And we’ve got quite a few of those.
Interestingly, the cast of characters from the campaign will also be making their way to the multiplayer. According to Garcia, the team’s hope is that if people do jump into multiplayer first, they’ll hear the various character chatter and then want to jump back over to the single-player to learn about their backstories and origins.
The characters in our single player campaign are also in multiplayer. So our hope is that people that do jump in to play multiplayer see our characters, hear them, hear their quips, hear their battle chatter and want to know a little bit more about them. And then if they want to, they can come over to single-player and get to see their backstories and how beautiful their origin stories are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfFU-vxbzd0&ab_channel=CallofDuty
While we’re yet to get our hands on the campaign for ourselves, our interest is definitely piqued. After chatting with both Garcia and Corriea, it sounds like we might be in for a few surprises.
“Without giving anything away, I think players are going to start this campaign and in the first 15 minutes, they’re going to think it’s something, and then at 16th minute, it’s not,” reveals Garcia in her parting words. “It’s absolutely not what they think it is.
I think we’re going to subvert some expectations in the story. We’ve turned a lot of the typical things you would see in a first-person shooter on its head in terms of emotional core, in terms of use of set pieces, in terms of the cast that we’ve created and blended together and where they come from. They’re not four super-powered humans who have been recruited to be super power humans for the special forces. They’re four people of ordinary origin who became extraordinary under extraordinary circumstances and how they get that way, I think is pretty fricking magical and very unsuspected.”
You can buy Call of Duty: Vanguard on Amazon now for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, XBO and PC.
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