Summer Game Fest begins tomorrow and we’ve been promised a look at Season 4 of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Call of Duty: Warzone during the opening show. According to VGC, one game we won’t be seeing is the new Call of Duty game scheduled to be released this year. Instead, Call of Duty: Vanguard is more likely to be revealed through an in-game event in Warzone later this summer. This would follow the same reveal pattern that Black Ops Cold War had in 2020 with an in-game reveal event in Warzone.
Sledgehammer Games is in charge of this year’s Call of Duty game and the title is expected to include a campaign, multiplayer modes, and zombies. Vanguard will supposedly return to World War II with missions focusing on the modern allied special forces in Europe and the Pacific. This means any tie-in will need to have a similar time period. Warzone‘s Verdansk has recently gone back in time to the 80s for the start of Season 3, featuring a revised Verdansk, but the Vanguard plans will reportedly take Warzone even further back in time to World War II, with an even more significant map overhaul to coincide with the game’s release.
The planned combination of Warzone and Vanguard has reportedly been a long time in the making. The result is a “significant amount of content” for the free-to-play battle royale title. This time there will be a completely new Vanguard map that is timed to arrive at the same time Vanguard is released. Rumored to be the “largest and most ambitious to date”, it will be set in the Pacific and is “significantly larger” than Verdansk. There will even be new vehicles to help players cope with the sheer size of the map.
The non-appearance of the new Call of Duty game at E3 or Summer Games Fest shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Activision has always preferred to have a stand-alone reveal event for their new COD games. Vanguard is still due to be released this year despite previous reports of disastrous development. Activision is now in the process of recruiting 2,000 more developers to help triple the size of the assorted Call of Duty teams, which include virtually every internal studio at the publisher now working on the franchise.
[Source: VGC]