Home IFTTT Pocket-lint Call of Duty Vanguard: Release date, platforms, and everything you need to know about the new COD

Call of Duty Vanguard: Release date, platforms, and everything you need to know about the new COD

September 08, 2021

There are certain fixtures you can rely on in the gaming calendar, and a regular Call of Duty release is absolutely one of the most predictable.

It's a series that has put out roughly a game per year for absolute aeons, and we now know loads about the next entry in the series - Call of Duty: Vanguard - which is taking events back to World War II.

Rumours and details are still circulating, too, providing us with some scraps of information that Activision has yet to divulge, and this is the place where we'll be gathering everything there is to know about Vanguard.

Read on to find out everything there is to know so far. 

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Call of Duty Vanguard release date

As already discussed, Call of Duty games don't tend to work on particularly flexible release timings - you can generally expect one to come out in Autumn each year, and 2021 will be no different on that front.

Vanguard's main developer is Sledgehammer Games, which previously created Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and World War II, both relatively solidly received entries in the series, and they've been working on it for quite a while.

The game's release date was revealed as part of a Warzone live event in August, and it's as follows: 5 November 2021.

Call of Duty Vanguard platforms

When it comes to platforms, we once again have finally got full confirmation of what you'll be able to play Vanguard on. The game will release for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and PC.

Next-generation consoles will be approaching their first anniversary when the game releases, so you can expect them to fly the flag for more graphically intensive and smooth-running gameplay, although every console will be targeting 60 frames per second.

It's also been confirmed that the game will be cross-platform and cross-generational, just like Cold War offers. Whether an extra year in the oven can see the next COD push its graphics further than Cold War will remain to be seen, of course, but we're hoping for 4K action and ray tracing to make sure everything looks at its very best. 

Call of Duty Vanguard alpha and beta tests

Now that we know when the game's coming out, the COD machine is really rolling up to speed, and that means there are going to be various public tests for people to try out the game, and help tune it to make sure everything's balanced.

The first was a PlayStation-exclusive open Alpha, but it's set to be followed by open Betas for those who've pre-ordered Vanguard on all platforms. The tests will let players sample the Champion Hill game mode that's being shouted about and more maps and modes over time.

The Alpha has now ended, but there will be two more tests in September, so be sure to get them downloaded if you qualify for an early taste of the action.

Call of Duty Vanguard gameplay

Here's where things might be a little harder to predict than you might think - while there are a few things we can be certain of when it comes to a COD game, there are still some real variables.

What we can rely on is that it'll be a first-person shooter with quick time-to-kill and twitchy gameplay and that it'll come with a relatively short but bombastic campaign, alongside a chunky multiplayer component.

We know that the singleplayer story follows a group of soldiers across different World War II fronts, charting the birth of special forces units, while multiplayer will launch with 20 maps, one of the biggest ever servings of locations for a COD game at launch. You can check out the first demo embedded above this section, showing off playable character Polina's introduction to the war in the chaos of Stalingrad.

There are some new innovations coming to Vanguard, too, building on systems brought in for Modern Warfare in 2019, some of which are in the footage shown off so far. For example, weapon mounting is getting more complicated, with blind fire and mounted movement coming to the party, and there's also a bunch of climbing from what we've seen.

Destructible cover will let you change the battlefield more than in any COD game before, while a full Gunsmith system will once again let you customise your weapons to an almost obsessive degree of detail.

There's a new multiplayer mode called Champion Hill that sounds like a small-scale battle royale and looks like loads of fun, and we'd expect to see some new and returning bits of equipment and weaponry to flesh everything out.

We played a load of this mode during the first Alpha test and it is indeed much close to Modern Warfare than Cold War, as befits the shared engine between the games. Recoil was more challenging due to dated weaponry, and there were plenty of bugs to be ironed out - but that's what these tests are for, so we're excited to see how it shapes up.

The game's multiplayer reveal stream was held in early September and has loads of interesting tidbits to offer up about how some of the game's new mechanics will actually work in action, so be sure to watch the whole thing if you're particularly interested - it's embedded above.

COD Vanguard story and title

The official announcement trailer from Activision confirms that pre-reveal image leaks hinting at a WWII setting were indeed accurate. And though that short clip wasn't completely flush with information (it was just a teaser, after all), it did confirm a few things that subsequent trailers have made concrete.

Vanguard will centre on four locations that appear in the trailer. Soldiers will fight across the War's key battlefields on the Eastern Front, Western Front, Pacific and North Africa.

As well as this campaign, which should span the globe and promises diverse visuals, there's also going to be a full continuation of the zombies mode, developed byTreyarch in cooperation with Sledgehammer, which is a fairly interesting development.

Call of Duty Vanguard integration with Warzone

Since Vanguard was unveiled in Warzone, it's always been clear that the Battle Royale will be a key part of Activision's strategy for the series going forward. That's confirmed by the fact that Warzone will be getting a huge new swathe of content when the game releases.

There's going to be a completely new map, at long last, as well as the major news of an anti-cheat software for PC players, to help combat the tide of hackers that's been overwhelming the game on some platforms in recent months.

After the multiplayer reveal event, we now know that the new map will be set in the Pacific and, from the brief glimpses we've seen, it looks absolutely gorgeous, especially in comparison to the slightly drab environment of Verdansk that we've been destroying for so long.

Warzone will also get a huge range of new weaponry, themed around Vanguard, but won't lose any of the guns or skins that players have earned or bought so far - it's going to be a real smorgasbord of content.

Whether this means that Warzone is actually travelling back in time again, or if we'll just be playing in a modern-day setting on an aged battlefield, only time will tell - for now, all we've seen is the environment from a zoomed-out perspective.



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