Following last week’s official announcement, Activision shared a chunk of Call of Duty: Vanguard campaign gameplay today during Geoff Keighley’s Opening Night Live stream. The demo (which you can watch above) centers around the Stalingrad mission that we had previously only heard about.
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The mission stars Polina Petrova, a sniper in the Soviet Red Army and one of the four playable protagonists in Vanguard’s campaign. We see Petrova fight through a burning, bombed-out Stalingrad (the same Stalingrad mission that used San Francisco’s actual sky as a skybox reference). Petrova works her way through a variety of weapons, graduating from a knife to a shotgun, to a sniper rifle, and then a Kar98.
It was a cool showcase of what looks like some great gun feedback and reload animations, but the mission itself is basically everything you’d expect from a standard CoD mission, now with prettier graphics. And wow, it does look pretty.
I was more interested in the campaign clip I saw in a closed press briefing, which we covered last week. That mission was a slower, more stealth-oriented survival mission that reminded me of Last of Us 2, but it’s clear Vanguard’s campaign will also have its fair share of loud, explosive moments like we saw today.