13 Things I Don’t Enjoy About Call Of Duty: Vanguard — Opinion

It’s been anoth­er year in the cycle of Call of Duty, and Sledge­ham­mer Games recent­ly launched Call of Duty: Van­guard. The game has been out for a lit­tle over a week and there are plen­ty of issues, which isn’t that much of a sur­prise — this typ­i­cal­ly hap­pens at the begin­ning of the new title. How­ev­er, it seems like Sledge­ham­mer was­n’t ful­ly pre­pared for Van­guard’s release.

Since this list is based on my opin­ion of the game, not every­one will agree with some of these points. That’s ok. I’m just pick­ing through the game based on 15 years of play­ing Call of Duty mul­ti­play­ers, so I’ve seen a lot of ter­ri­ble launch­es. While Call of Duty: Van­guard’s release isn’t exact­ly the worst–to me–the mul­ti­play­er is just all over the place.

You can check out my full list of griev­ances below.

1. The Spawns

This is one of those prob­lems that real­ly should have been addressed imme­di­ate­ly after Van­guard was released. The Dome and Das Haus maps are the worst for spawn­ing in front of ene­mies. Sledge­ham­mer has said they “fixed” the spawns on Dome, but I promise, they are not much better. 

Hard­point, Patrol, and Dom­i­na­tion spawns are crazy. Hard­point and Patrol spawns in par­tic­u­lar, are con­sis­tent­ly made of a chaot­ic mess­es, with ene­mies rean­i­mat­ing behind your teams’ posi­tion. Even if you just spawned there ten sec­onds earlier. 

Dom­i­na­tion spawns are just as frus­trat­ing, because these are sup­posed to be more of a fixed spawn sit­u­a­tion. Typ­i­cal­ly, ene­mies will spawn on the side or maybe one from the back, so they can try to push the oppos­ing team off of B flag. This isn’t what hap­pens in Van­guard. Ene­mies will sim­ply spawn in droves at what­ev­er home flag your team start­ed at, flip­ping the team spawns entire­ly. This shift actu­al­ly makes it hard to keep a team off of B, because there is no reli­able way of cut­ting off an ene­my team from that location. 

2. The Maps

While some of Van­guard’s maps are O.K., most of them are poor­ly laid out. This makes it dif­fi­cult to approach cer­tain objec­tive points, since a major­i­ty of them don’t have any lane design, lean­ing more towards a chaos vibe. On the oth­er hand, some of the maps end up with play­ers extreme­ly con­cen­trat­ed in one area, with the rest of the map being most­ly abandoned.

I also don’t like the over­whelm­ing amount of ver­ti­cal­i­ty on a num­ber of the maps. This leaves vul­ner­a­ble spawn points for cer­tain game modes, like Team Death­match, Kill con­firmed, and Dom­i­na­tion. It can also make it dif­fi­cult to move off of cer­tain spawns loca­tions. I’ve also noticed that quite a few B flag loca­tions for Dom­i­na­tion favor one side over the oth­er, by a mar­gin that is noticeable. 

3. Day And Night

Although play­ers stand out a tad bet­ter than they did dur­ing Van­guard’s beta, there are still sec­tions of maps where it’s still hard to make out char­ac­ter mod­els. Or some­times com­plete­ly impos­si­ble. This is due to a com­bi­na­tion of dark sur­round­ings and cloth­ing appro­pri­ate from the WWII era. 

On the flip side of this, what is up with the ther­mite and Molo­tovs? It’s like the freak­ing sun is blar­ing straight into your eyes. Obvi­ous­ly, this isn’t con­ducive to spot­ting ene­mies. It’s worse than any flash grenade I’ve ever encountered.

4. Weapons..Just In General

Much like the rest of Van­guard, the weapons are all over the place. The sys­tem is unlike Black Ops Cold War, where the attach­ments set to the same lev­el on every sin­gle gun. For exam­ple, the Agency Sup­pres­sor unlocks at lev­el 46 for on all weapons. 

This is not the case for Van­guard. The dif­fer­ent weapon types have vary­ing attach­ments that don’t even unlock at the same lev­el as the oth­ers with­in the same weapon cat­e­go­ry. It’s just odd. 

There is also the usu­al­ly over­pow­ered weapons, with over­pow­ered attach­ments. Right now, the STG44, the MP-40, the Com­bat Shot­gun, and the Gracey Auto are rather irri­tat­ing to see con­sis­tent­ly in the killfeed. The shot­guns are super frus­trat­ing on Das Haus. It’s obvi­ous some of these weapons need a nerf.

Also, the numer­ous attach­ments that can make bring weapons into an over­pow­ered state, like Pinned (increased flinch dealt to ene­mies), Incen­di­ary (burn­ing rounds), and Fran­gi­ble (crip­ple tar­get’s move­ments when shot into legs).

5. 70 Lev­els A Weapon

Holy cow, the amount of time it can take to get cer­tain weapons ful­ly lev­eled is just mind-numb­ing. Even for the ones that are eas­i­er to acquire, I just think it’s too much. Most of the attach­ments are optics, with the impor­tant pieces stretched out between the long list of sights. 

I think it would have been bet­ter if Sledge­ham­mer had removed a num­ber of the sights, since some of them give the same mag­ni­fy­ing ben­e­fits. It would also help a great deal if the stu­dio would just slight­ly increase the weapon XP to reach that lev­el 70 a lit­tle bit faster.

This also keeps play­ers on the same weapon, because it requires a bit of invest­ment to acquire the high­er attach­ments. A lot of peo­ple don’t want to start over with a new weapon, while oth­ers are using far more pow­er­ful ones.

6. Cer­tain Weapons Are Just Hard To Use

With all the ful­ly auto­mat­ic weapons in Call of Duty: Van­guard, it can be dif­fi­cult to use cer­tain guns. Sniper rifles and Marks­man rifles are not the eas­i­est weapons to use. Cer­tain maps are bet­ter for these par­tic­u­lar rifles, but the range of assault rifles and SMGs can be frus­trat­ing to deal with. It’s not impos­si­ble to use snipers and marks­man, but it’s for sure an irri­tat­ing expe­ri­ence when you’re try­ing to com­plete challenges.

7. Time-To-Kill

This is a con­stant issue with Call of Duty titles, and Van­guard is no dif­fer­ent. With how pow­er­ful the weapons can be, more often than not, play­ers are rack­ing up a crazy amount of mul­ti­kills. I think the high­est I’ve seen was 50, in Blitz Com­bat Pac­ing on Das Haus. This could only real­ly hap­pen if the time-to-kill and the spawns are out of wack. Peo­ple com­plained about Black Ops Cold War’s TTK, but I feel Van­guard’s is slight­ly faster. This makes it even hard­er to get out of spawn traps or react to some­one who is behind/to the side of you.

8. Foot­steps Anyone?

Where the hell are the ene­my foot­step sounds?! Sledge­ham­mer stat­ed they adjust­ed the audio mix in a patch before the game released. Yeah, no they did­n’t. I’m using a pre­mi­um head­set, with the vol­ume adjust­ed accord­ing­ly, but still can’t hear ene­my foot­fall. My, and my team’s foot­steps sound like a stamped of ele­phants though. 

I con­stant­ly have High Alert on, sim­ply because I can’t hear when a com­bat­ant has spawned behind me or snuck up into our spawn zone. It’s quite ridiculous.

9. The Perks Are..Something

I hon­est­ly hate the Perks in Van­guard. Half of them are under­whelm­ing, with a cou­ple that will like­ly be unused for the full year. 

The Perk 1 cat­e­go­ry is full of the best perks, like Ghost, Cold Blood­ed, Daunt­less, and For­ti­fied. It also con­tains Nin­ja, but who’s using it right now? Oh yeah, no one.

The Perk 2 sec­tion has a ton of ene­my aware­ness perks, which is fine, but noth­ing stands out. How­ev­er, there is one perk in this cat­e­go­ry that rubs me the wrong way. Radar is just unnec­es­sary, as ene­mies should always appear on the min­imap when they fire unsi­lenced weapons. Like every oth­er Call of Duty mul­ti­play­er in history.

Perk 3’s list is just weak. There are only three perks in that are even worth your time in this cat­e­go­ry, but peo­ple most­ly use Light­weight. I hon­est­ly nev­er want­ed to see this perk again in my life. It just makes peo­ple with SMGs so much more annoy­ing, espe­cial­ly when you’re attempt­ing to accom­plish any kind of chal­lenge goal.

10. Kill­streaks

For the love of every­thing in the uni­verse, STOP. WITH. THE. KILLSTREAKS. They don’t push play­ers to move towards the objec­tive, so play­ing any kind of objec­tive-based game mode is a hor­ror show. Almost every match I see my team­mates run away from the ini­tial Dom­i­na­tion spawn, then right past B, only to die in the mid­dle by ene­mies who are also ignor­ing the Dom­i­na­tion points. 

Hard­point and Patrol are even worse, as team­mates just take off from the Hard­point or Patrol zone because they are more con­cerned with get­ting those kills. I’m here to win and do well. 

I was sur­pris­ing­ly pleased with Tre­yarch’s approach to this prob­lem with last year’s Call of Duty. Yeah, you could get your streaks by sim­ply killing oppo­nents, but play­ing the objec­tive while doing so would rack up those points so much faster. I want every Call of Duty game to adopt this type of Streak sys­tem, as it rewards objec­tive players–but allows every­one else to get a chance at earn­ing their streaks.

11. Glitch­es

Wow, the glitch­es and bugs are real. Oper­a­tor mod­els are miss­ing pieces in the menus, some Chal­lenges are not track­ing prop­er­ly, weapons are “unlock­ing” attach­ments ahead of themselves–the list goes on. It’s just unfor­tu­nate that there are so many minor prob­lems with the game, as it will just take longer for the major issues to be addressed.

12. Cheaters

Yup, cheaters are out there. Sledge­ham­mer has­n’t imple­ment­ed its Ric­o­chet anti-cheat into Van­guard yet, and it won’t be com­ing until Decem­ber. I’m cur­rent­ly play­ing on a PS5, so I’ve just turned off cross­play. I’ll like­ly keep it off even after the anti-cheat is in the works, because I want to make sure it’s leav­ing cheaters at the door.

If you’re play­ing on con­sole, I would sug­gest the same to you. But it’s your choice.

13. MVP

Last­ly, MVP. I don’t under­stand the rea­son­ing for it. It’s just an added amount of time into the game, keep­ing play­ers in it longer. I get the Play of the Game high­light intro, because that play­er had the best sequence of kills in that match, but MVP is just time-wasting.