CoD players slam Vanguard’s “shocking” lack of Factions

Andrew Highton
cod vanguard soldier holding lmg

The Beta for Call of Duty: Vanguard seems to have confirmed that the game will not feature factions, and instead, each team will be designated by “My Team” and “Enemy Team,” which has left players disgruntled.

Since the dawn of Call of Duty’s online play, every game’s multiplayer has always had each team divvied up into established forces.

CoD 4 notably had Task Force 141 and OpFor, and the recent Modern Warfare had various sub-teams within the two primary forces – Coalition and Allegiance.

Each CoD title has used this system, but Vanguard’s Beta suggests that this won’t be the case for Sledgehammer’s newest title. This has left some gamers frustrated and think it makes no sense in terms of the game’s overall attitude towards the era.

cod vanguard players fighting

The main argument put forward by Reddit user Complete_Ad_1122 in their “No factions in a WW2 game is shocking” post is that you can have forces that opposed each other in World War 2 now fighting as allies.

“Who the hell thought about that? You can have a Nazi operator fighting alongside a British operator. Seriously, all they talked about was immersion and tactical gameplay, this goes completely against all of those core philosophies.

“The entire premise of a WW2 game in any capacity is the Allies v Axis. Update: The game does feature Nazi Operators, believe it or not, it’s on the screenshots, so no, it’s not for MTX [Microtransaction] opportunities.”

Given all the details revealed about Vanguard so far: the return of Gunsmith, FOV slider, and all the new multiplayer features, the lack of clear online roles may not be a huge issue to the majority of players.

One user did provide an interesting counter-argument to this change in philosophy, saying: “Not trying to be devil’s advocate, but knowing how the media is so sensitive and dramatic nowadays, I think they wanted to avoid polemics like “Activision and SHG are selling you Axis-themed bundles.”

Call of Duty: Vanguard is still very much in its beta phase, and the sole purpose is to try and ascertain if decisions like this are worthwhile or not. With plenty of time left before the game’s release date, it’s possible that Sledgehammer may reconsider this approach.

Also, check out the new Pacific Warzone map.

Image Credit: Sledgehammer Games

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