You get a cinematic first-person panorama as Kingsley parachutes out of a plane after it takes a hit and now has an engine afire. Arthur Kingsley, a British paratrooper attempting to land behind enemy lines in German-occupied France on the night before D-Day. The Sledgehammer team showed part of a mission from the game involving one of the main characters, Sgt. as a team we are committed to making sure all team members feel safe, welcome and respected." " Harassment of any kind goes against everything we stand for as a studio. "The stories and the pain that have been shared are simply devastating," said Sledgehammer studio head Aaron Halon last week before previewing Call of Duty: Vanguard. Allen Brack, the head of Blizzard Entertainment, has also subsequently stepped down and was replaced by Jen Oneal and Mike Ybarra as co-leaders of the studio. "I am sorry that we did not provide the right empathy and understanding." "It is imperative that we acknowledge all perspectives and experiences and respect the feelings of those who have been mistreated in any way," he said in a note to employees. Women of color were "particularly impacted," the suit charges, and women employees were subject to constant sexual harassment including groping, comments and advances.Īctivision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick apologized after the company's initial response to the lawsuit led to an employee walkout. The suit alleges the video game publisher paid women less than men, and fired or forced women to quit at higher frequencies than men. The game's reveal comes amid internal conflict at parent company Activision Blizzard, which faces a lawsuit filed last month by the state of California over sexual harassment and equal pay violations.
"We kind of came out of that just scratching the surface, where we felt there was all these new stories," said Vanguard director Josh Bridge.Ĭall of Duty: Vanguard has a new story with no connection to the 2017 game and "feels like a different take on World War 2," Bridge said during a recent online presentation about the new game's development.
"It feels realistic and authentic."Īfter Sledgehammer finished Call of Duty WWII-the top-selling game of 2017, generating more than $1 billion in revenue by the year's end-the studio wanted to create another game set in that period. "We were really inspired by these first special forces operators and they seemed like such interesting characters that we wanted to explore," said David Swenson, creative director of the game's single-player story campaign for development studio Sledgehammer Games.Ĭall of Duty: Vanguard's story is fiction, but "even though we are not beholden to history, we are rooted in history," Swenson said. In developing the single-player story campaign, Sledgehammer's creative team worked with historians including Marty Morgan, author of "D-Day: A Photographic History of the Normandy Invasion" who served as technical director on the studio's 2017 game Call of Duty WWII. Special operations forces such as SEAL Team Six grew out of Allied experiments with small squads chosen for specialized missions in World War II.
#MAKING HISTORY THE SECOND WORLD WAR MULTIPLAYER SERIES#
5 for Microsoft Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One, Sony PlayStation 5 and PS4, and PCs on ), you get to know-and fight as-four different characters who eventually team up as the first special forces squad for a mission against the Nazis in Berlin. Call of Duty: Vanguard, the next entry in Activision's multibillion-selling video game franchise, inserts players into many pivotal battles including the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Midway, and Operation Tonga on the eve of the D-Day invasion.