Let’s be honest, Sledgehammer Games, the studio behindCall of Duty: Vanguard,has their work cut out for them if they have any hope of winning back the Zombies fanbase. Yes, the multiplayer and campaign ofVanguardhave been pretty positively received, but the Zombies mode has been dubbed by the majority of the diehard Zombies communityas the worst it has ever been.
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There is a laundry list of things to take out, add in, fix, and change in order to redeemCall of Duty:Vanguard’sZombies Mode,but let’s go over some of the most obvious fixes and tips, as well as some of the more realistic ones.
10Field Upgrades & How They Work
Field Upgrades inVanguardZombies are straight-up worse than they were inBlack Ops Cold War. They’re the exact same Field Upgrades at a glance, but they’re buggier and less reliable inVanguard.
The most obvious example is Ring of Fire, as it no longer puts the purple ring beneath the player, but seems to prioritize putting it on the closest “flat ground” which is almost always partially underneath some environmental terrain. To fix this, they really just need to clean up all of the bugs and add in one or two entirely new Field Upgrades.
9The Dark Aether Camo & Missing Pack-A-Punch Camo
This next aspect of Vanguard Zombies was the big sign for long-time Zombies players thatVanguardZombies might not be what they’re looking for. The fact thatVanguardZombies has no Pack-A-Punch Camo at all is pretty bad, especially when the last game had different Camo for each of the three PaP levels.
Then, players take a look at the Dark Aether Camo, this moving lime green cheetah-esque moving texture, and it gets even worse. The Dark Aether camo inCold Warwas a bit basic, yes, but the purple space texture matched thematically with the introduction of the Dark Aether itself, a realm that is primarily purple and infinitely complex, like the cosmos.
InVanguardZombies, the Dark Aether Camo is just green……for some reason, even though the most prominent color forVanguardZombies both in-game and in the advertising was the color red.Frankly, fans have been showing that they can easily do it better,and that’s never a good look.
8In-Depth Descriptions For Perk Tiers
The way these new Demonic Fountains work inVanguardZombies is simple; players just have to keep buying them until level four, and then that “Perk” is maxed out. The first level of each Perk is free, but every level after that costs more and more money, which is fine as that’s sort of how it goes in Zombies. But, where the problem comes in is that players have no idea what these Perk Upgrades are actually improving, or by how much.
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There needs to be some concrete numbers or percentages given when players hover over the Demonic Fountains, and it shouldn’t be too hard to add this in either.
7More Voice Lines & Less Voice Line Triggers
By now, anyone that has tried out the Der Anfang Zombies experience has likely heard the line fromVon List “Professor, it is time to bid your toy soldiers auf wiedersehen”about a million times. In fact, it’s sort of becoming the biggest punchline on theVanguardZombies Reddit, with some users even going for “speedruns” to get the line to trigger (the current record is at 8 seconds, by the way). Obviously, this line needs to be heavily reduced in how many times it can trigger, but the dialogue for everyone, including the Operators, needs to be more contextual and less randomly triggered.
6Solo Zombies Issues
Probably the funniest thing about the current state ofVanguardZombies is that even the Solo players who just love the grind weapon exp for Dark Aether in any gamecan’t even do that well outside of using exploits. This is thanks to Sledgehammer, for some reason, removing the ability to pause in a Solo run. What this means is, if the Solo player wants to take a break for any amount of time or pause while they take a phone call or open their door, they’ll be kicked from their Solo play session for being AFK or downed by Zombies with the pause menu pulled up.
5Game Stability On Higher Rounds
This next issue has always been a constant problem with the more recentCoDZombies, and it’s the overall stability of the games.Cold Warhad this problem a lot too where players would be trying to see just how high they could go in a Round-Based map, but their game would always crash at some point in the hundreds.Vanguardalso suffers from this, though it’s a bit less prevalent.
Still, for anyone brave enough to repeat these same three objectives until they get to round 100+, just know that it becomes more likely that the game will crash with every round.
4Bring Back Killstreaks
One of the few thingsVanguardZombies did that improved something fromCold War Zombiesis the Salvage adjustments. In Cold War, players had to keep track of two different types of Salvage, High and Low-Grade to be exact.
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InVanguardZombies, there is only one type of Salvage, but in exchange, there’s almost nothing to spend it on. If there were killstreaks in this game, as there were in Cold War with things like Chopper Gunners, Sentry Turrets, and more, at least it would feel like there was more stuff to try out.
3Bring Back The Wall Buys
There was absolutely zero reason for Sledgehammer Games to take out wall buy weapons inVanguardZombies. Sure, thanks to the Loadout systemCold Warintroduced into the Zombies formula, wall buys were a bit less useful than they were previously, but eventually, Cold War fixed this issue. Basically, as the rounds got higher, the wall buy weapons would have a chance to start increasing in their rarity, eventually getting to the point that players could buy Legendary-grade weapons off the wall, easily justifying their cost.
Taking it out inVanguardZombies just makes it easier for players to see just how bare-bones this game type really is.
2Introduce An Equivalent To The “Loose Change” Easter Egg
Out of every complaint and needed fix on this list, this is by far the smallest. But, one of the most long-standing and iconic aspects ofCoDZombies is that players can prone next to Perk Machines to get a free 100 points of “Loose Change”. This implies that the player character is reaching under the machine for change, which is just hilarious.
And, since Demonic Fountains replace Perk Machines inVanguardZombies, it was a perfect chance to do a twist on this concept. Maybe by having players jump on top of the fountain they would get Loose Change as if to imply they hopped into the fountain and reached into it grasping at spare coins. But, a simple solution like this isn’t inVanguard, and instead, the whole Loose Change concept is ignored entirely.
1Let Players Mark Things Both On The Map & In Front Of Them
And finally, let’s talk about marking things in Zombies. When playing with a group, being able to mark equipment on the ground or Level One Armor is incredibly helpful, especially in a chaotic mode like Zombies. Then, in the Outbreak mode introduced inCold War, players begged for a way to mark the map itself so they could non-verbally guide their lobby towards certain objectives. And, eventually, this mechanic was added to the game!
But, inVanguardZombies, neither a map mark nor a ping system exists currently.Since Der Anfang’s hub areaand maps are so small, it’s not a huge deal for the map marker to be missing, but not having a ping systemjust feels like intentionally ripping established concepts out at this point.
Call of Duty: Vanguardis available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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