CALL OF DUTY VANGUARD BETA – TIPS AND TRICKS TO KNOW BEFORE YOU PLAY
September 15, 2021
The Call of Duty Vanguard beta is about to open to the masses after a PlayStation exclusive weekend. Whether you’re playing on Xbox, PC, or PlayStation, you’ll want to ensure you brush up on your skills and make the most of the beta.
With a return to World War II and the Modern Warfare engine, the Vanguard beta might be a bit of a shock to those more familiar with Cold War or old-school Call of Duty titles. The more tactile approach to gameplay means a great deal of movement mechanics and gun changes to get to grips with.
To help you prepare in advance of the coming weekend, we’ve whipped up a beginner’s guide to the Call of Duty Vanguard Beta.
The Vanguard beta is your chance to try out the new mechanics in Call of Duty this year.
1. Know Your Cover
Cover has had a massive overhaul in Vanguard, with destruction being its newest feature. Wooden panels placed throughout the map will chip away with each impact and can even be completely destroyed. While this adds a nice visual dynamic to Vanguard’s maps, it also leads to some interesting gameplay potential.
Wooden cover can be found in walls, windows, and even ceilings and floors. It allows you to make your own path and get the drop on enemies. In many ways, this should counter camping in Call of Duty, but it also gives players more options in the series’ traditionally tight-knit maps. Shotguns and SMGs are excellent for clearing a path, but by activating the tactical sprint (which is faster with your gun raised) you can smash your way straight through.
Vanguard’s cover is far from concrete.
Shooting small holes through these cover areas will allow you to spot and fire upon enemies while out of sight. Just be careful, as you can be shot back just as easily. And if you are healing up, make sure you know what kind of cover you’re hiding behind.
Destruction isn’t the only change to cover, however, as players can now blind fire over it. In some of the more hectic areas of Vanguard’s maps, blind fire allows players to take out enemies without opening themselves up to a bunch of incoming fire. You will lose a bit of precision, as it is essentially the hip-fire of mounting, but it can be brilliant for those close-call battles.
2. Watch Those Open Straights
With snipers, assault rifles, and even some long-ranged SMGs, the open, straight sections of any map can be a bullet-riddled nightmare to traverse. And thanks to the mounting feature making its way back into Call of Duty, camping enemies can blast down these avenues with next to no recoil.
Campers causing you trouble? Carve your own path around them or suppress them to make an opening.
Your best bet is usually to sneak around the tighter segments of the map which provide plenty of cover. Want to approach more directly? The new suppression mechanic can also sort out those pesky campers.
By firing at an enemy, you can suppress them, physically slowing them down. This can allow you time to make a move and is especially useful with the game’s sturdier long-range weapons such as the BAR or the STG44.
3. Find the Gun That Suits You, Not the Game
Call of Duty is constantly circulating its meta weapons, where fire rate, damage per second, and manoeuvrability are key. Vanguard is hoping to change this through the inclusion of the Gunsmith and caliber customization. In the multiplayer reveal, Sledgehammer stated that they were hoping to move away from the importance of fire rate, which typically means SMGs are the most-used guns in the game.
Customization is there for both weapons and field of view settings – make use of it.
This means that if you find the gun that is right for you, be it a Revolving Shotgun or Kar98k, you’ll want to stick with it. By levelling it up, it will eventually become a beastly machine in its own right. On paper, it puts the emphasis back on player choice. But with this brief beta being the biggest chunk of the game that players have gotten their hands on so far, this new approach has yet to be fully proven. What the beta did provide, however, was a glimpse of how powerful some guns could become with the upgrade system in Champion Hill.
4. Use the FOV Slider
This is an easy feature to forget about if you aren’t acquainted with it. The FOV slider can be found in the graphics settings and can vastly improve visibility. If you are playing crossplay with anyone on PC while on consoles, the FOV slider is a must, and greatly improves the first-person experience.
The FOV slider is a new feature for Call of Duty on consoles.
5. Experiment With the Different Guns and Perks
For those of you worried about getting a poor start of your Vanguard record, you need not worry about the beta. Stats from the beta won’t carry over into the base game when it releases on November 5th.
This essentially allows players to have a bit more fun and experiment with what the game has to offer. As mentioned with the customization options, trying out different guns might result in you finding a setup that you wouldn’t typically play with. And with a ton of perks to try out, there’s plenty on offer. Who knows, you might even manage to earn the V2 Rocket, Vanguard’s version of the nuke.
Read More: Splitgate: 8 Tips and Tricks To Get You Started
Splitgate. Portal, Halo, Quake. What if they had a party, everyone had too much fun and left with each other’s stuff mixed up together.
Well, then you would have something like this. Except…not…well maybe…It’s Splitgate!
With a love for all things gaming, Aaron has continued to discuss, debate, and dissect the medium across articles and video on sites such as NME, BBC The Social, and Techradar. You can find him over on Twitter @WatchPlayType, or more commonly sweating his way through Apex Legends lobbies.
