Sledgehammer Games' Call of Duty: Vanguard launches this November, and the game recently finished up its alpha and early access beta playtest periods. Gamers have now had the chance to get a taste of what's to come in Vanguard, and many Call of Duty fans have strong opinions about the direction the game takes its minimap. In this article, we'll explain everything you need to know about Vanguard's minimap.
In Modern Warfare 2019, the minimap in-game worked a lot differently from previous Call of Duty games. Though an arcade shooter franchise, Call of Duty has long since flirted with realism, and that's the direction Modern Warfare 2019 took: enemies that fired an unsuppressed weapon would not appear on the game's minimap as a red dot.
Traditionally, this feature balanced suppressors in-game: the attachment would often cut down on range or bullet velocity in exchange for concealing your position. This is how the system works in Black Ops Cold War: muzzle flash concealment scales all the way up to suppressors with 100% muzzle flash concealment, meaning you won't appear on the minimap at all when firing a suppressed weapon.
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Call of Duty: Vanguard is a mix of the two systems: Like Modern Warfare 2019, in Vanguard, firing an unsuppressed weapon will not cause you to appear as a red dot on the minimap. However, while suppressors in general in Vanguard do not interact with the minimap, the subsonic ammo type does.
If you use subsonic ammo as an attachment on your weapon, when you fire it you won't appear as a red dot on the game's minimap. However, you can only see players firing guns without subsonic ammo on the minimap if you equip the Radar Perk in the game's Perk 2 slot.
Like Modern Warfare 2019, in Vanguard you'll get to choose from three Perks spread across three different Perk slots. Black Ops Cold War's Perk Greed Wildcard allowed players to select two Perks from each slot, but this feature won't be returning to Vanguard, so you'll have a maximum of three Perks outside of a Specialist system like the one seen in Modern Warfare 2019.
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This means that if you prefer the traditional Call of Duty minimap where players will appear as red dots if they fire guns without the correct attachment, you'll have to permanently give up on using any other Perk in the Perk 2 slot spread across all of your loadouts.
Overpowered Perks in the sense of Perks that are so good that it doesn't make sense to really ever not run them have been a mainstay in Call of Duty for quite some time. This is somewhat inevitable, because of the ways gamers always try to play a Call of Duty game. For example, Perks that reduce explosive damage will always be popular because gamers love blowing up people in Call of Duty.
Ultimately, for fans of the traditional Call of Duty minimap, it's a huge upgrade to have a Perk that enables this playstyle as opposed to it not being a supported playstyle whatsoever in Modern Warfare 2019, and since it is an optional thing, you have the choice of playing the game in the traditional way as well as changing things up and play differently. This sounds good to many players, but many others still prefer the game in its entirety to play more familiarly.
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This comes down to camping and how the game incentivizes players to play. In Modern Warfare 2019, since you wouldn't appear on the minimap, footsteps were loud, and Dead Silence allowed you to fly across the map completely silently, players were encouraged to play really slowly and wait until someone wandered into their kill-zone.
Vanguard's system encourages less passivity, but it remains to be seen if the community finds these changes enough to sustain the game long-term. Plus, it's entirely possible the systems in Vanguard will be tweaked and adjusted before release, changing the dynamics of these systems in-game
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