Call of Duty: Vanguard launches on November 5th, 2021. Coming with Vanguard is a new anti-cheat system, Ricochet, engine upgrades, an entirely new map, and Vanguard weapons making their way into Warzone. We don’t have too much official word on this works just yet, but in this article we’ll tell you everything we know about the upcoming Call of Duty: Vanguard and Warzone integration.
First off, it’s important to understand that when Vanguard releases, Warzone is not going to be updated on release day. The major changes coming to Warzone as part of the Vanguard integration will take place sometime after Vanguard launches. This hasn’t been officially confirmed yet, but it’s safe to say that after Warzone Season 6 ends, the new season that begins will integrate Vanguard and Warzone.
Just like Black Ops Cold War, Vanguard won’t go live with a Season 1 but rather go live with its launch content for a period of time before the first season begins and new content is added. Activision structures releases like this to not have two new flagship products come out at the same time and cannibalize each other’s playerbase. This way there’s time for players to enjoy everything in the Call of Duty world.
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Ricochet, Call of Duty’s new anti-cheat solution, is coming to both Vanguard and Warzone, and it will be packaged with Vanguard at launch. However, the kernel-level driver feature of Ricochet will not launch with Vanguard and will instead come first to Warzone, but this feature won’t be coming to Warzone on Vanguard’s launch day. Instead, it will come to Warzone when Warzone’s Vanguard integration happens. After the kernel-level drivers come to Warzone, then they will make their way to Vanguard sometime later.
What will the Vanguard integration be like? Well, there isn’t much official confirmation just yet, but there’s a lot of evidence that suggests the integration will be a lot different than Black Ops Cold War’s Warzone integration. Cold War’s integration simply involved adding Cold War weapons to Warzone, and later, a Cold War version of Verdansk was added, Verdansk ‘84.
Vanguard’s Warzone integration brings major engine updates, a kernel-level anti-cheat, and an entirely map to Warzone as well as Vanguard’s weapons. Up until now, Warzone has run on Modern Warfare 2019’s engine and is a part of the Modern Warfare game client. But the major changes coming to Warzone with Vanguard likely necessitate a larger technical upgrade.
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Especially since the Warzone update that integrates Vanguard is being marketed as Warzone Pacific and not simply a Warzone update, it seems more likely that Warzone will either become a part of the Vanguard client or get its whole own client. This means that there would be a new application to launch instead of Modern Warfare to run Warzone Pacific.
This would make sense in the context of the more fundamental engine changes coming to Warzone that weren’t possible in Modern Warfare 2019, like destruction. While this also hasn’t been directly confirmed, Warzone Pacific has been announced to be running the Vanguard engine. The Vanguard engine is an upgraded version of the Modern Warfare 2019 engine that sports a variety of upgrades, one of the biggest of which is more destructible environments and cover.
This means that it’s entirely possible in Warzone Pacific destructible cover and environments may come to Warzone. This would come as a major change to the Warzone gameplay loop which currently doesn’t include any sort of destruction whatsoever. Cover isn’t destructible, and buildings and other features of the environment are static.
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Call of Duty: Vanguard is a WW2 game set in various fronts during the Second World War, and Warzone Pacific, as you would expect, brings Warzone to a Pacific island, obviously reminiscent of the eastern front of the Second World War. However, it has not been confirmed that Warzone Pacific is actually set in WW2.
There is reason to believe Vanguard won’t canonically be set in WW2 because of the weapons already in Warzone from Modern Warfare as well as Black Ops Cold War. These weapons are much more modern than WW2 weapons and wouldn’t fit the aesthetic of a WW2 game particularly well.
So, Raven, the developer of Warzone, might want to try to bridge that gap by bringing Warzone to the Pacific, which fits neatly in line with the tone and aesthetic of Vanguard, while not necessarily bringing the game, in terms of Warzone’s story and lore, actually to WW2.
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However, this ties into other problems Warzone has, and it ties into more speculation about Warzone Pacific. See, when Black Ops Cold War was integrated into Warzone, the new weapons added completely outclassed the Modern Warfare guns. Even today, the meta of the game is overwhelmingly filled with Cold War weapons.
There are similar concerns about Vanguard’s weapons, which are going to be able to have ten attachments whereas Modern Warfare and Cold War guns only have up to five attachments, though in Cold War you can technically have up to eight attachments on your gun. Many worry that the new Vanguard weapons will naturally outpace even the Cold War weapons.
Weapon bloat is also another concern. As more and more guns are added to Warzone, each weapon becomes less and less unique. Many guns are functionally the same, which makes it difficult and confusing to decide what weapons to use. With a third game’s worth of weapons added, this problem will only become more pronounced.
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Some members of the community suggest that weapons get vaulted or otherwise removed from circulation to make room for new guns. But many are also concerned that their hard work and time spent leveling guns and unlocking camos will go to waste if certain weapons from certain games are removed or otherwise gated.
It seems unlikely, from a business standpoint, that Activision will remove guns from multiple other Call of Duty games from Warzone, because a big part of Call of Duty’s business model is selling blueprints and getting players to use their special, custom weapons across both mainline Call of Duty games as well as Warzone. If players know that their time spent and their money spent has an expiration date, they may not want to dedicate as much of their resources in the game.
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