Call of Duty is parachuting back into World War II.
August 20,2021 Call of Duty is parachuting back into World War II. Call of Duty: Vanguard, the next entry in Activision’s multibillion-selling video game franchise, inserts players into many pivotal battles including the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Midway, and Operation Tonga on the eve of the D-Day invasion. In the game (out Nov.5 for Microsoft Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One, Sony PlayStation 5 and PS4, and PCs on Battle.net), you get to know—and fight as—four different characters who eventually team up as the first special forces squad for a mission against the Nazis in Berlin. Special operations forces such as SEAL Team Six grew out of Allied experiments with small squads chosen for specialized missions in World War II. In developing the single-player story campaign, Sledgehammer’s creative team worked with historians including Marty Morgan, author of «D-Day: A Photographic History of the Normandy Invasion» who served as technical director on the studio’s 2017 game Call of Duty WWII. «We were really inspired by these first special forces operators and they seemed like such interesting characters that we wanted to explore,» said David Swenson, creative director of the game’s single-player story campaign for development studio Sledgehammer Games. Call of Duty: Vanguard’s story is fiction, but «even though we are not beholden to history, we are rooted in history,» Swenson said. «It feels realistic and authentic.» After Sledgehammer finished Call of Duty WWII—the top-selling game of 2017, generating more than $1 billion in revenue by the year’s end—the studio wanted to create another game set in that period. «We kind of came out of that just scratching the surface, where we felt there was all these new stories,» said Vanguard director Josh Bridge. Call of Duty: Vanguard has a new story with no connection to the 2017 game and «feels like a different take on World War 2,» Bridge said during a recent online presentation about the new game’s development. Addressing harassment allegations The game’s reveal comes amid internal conflict at parent company Activision Blizzard, which faces a lawsuit filed last month by the state of California over sexual harassment and equal pay violations.
