During a recent New York Comic Con panel, one of the writers behind Call of Duty Vanguard spoke about the team's desire to make more 'iconic' characters within the franchise, similar to the likes of Halo's Master Chief.
As reported by VGC, Call of Duty: Vanguard writer Sam Maggs opened up about the team's hopes for Vanguard and how they would like to create more prolific standout characters within the franchise. “We came into this process saying, ‘how do we make the iconic CoD characters?’ because you don’t really have that in Call of Duty right now,” she stated during the panel.
“You know when you think about a game like Halo, you think of Master Chief, but when you think of CoD there’s not really those standout characters." While previous iterations of the Call of Duty franchise have seen noteworthy characters such as Captain Price, Ghost, and Captain "Soap" MacTavish, more recent entries into the franchise arguably haven't capitalized on character development to quite the same extent.
Maggs says that the team started by coming up with characters that it felt could be "flagship" heroes in the franchise, because they want to be able to carry their stories over into future Vanguard games, should that be the direction that Activision decides to take Call of Duty. "We are hoping that if people love them as much as we do, that we get to continue to tell the story of these people and make them sort of like figureheads for this era of CoD basically,” she concluded.
As per Call of Duty's website, Vanguard's upcoming campaign will focus on the escapades of Task Force One as they attempt to stop the Nazi party from implementing the mysterious Project Phoenix toward the end of WW2. The special forces squad itself is made up of four playable characters: Sergeant Arthur Kingsley, Lieutenant Polina Petrova, Private Lucas Riggs, and Lieutenant First Class Wade Jackson. Sergeant Richard Webb will make up the fifth member of the team, though it seems that he won't be playable throughout the campaign. The site also notes that these operators will also make up a third of the game's twelve playable characters in Vanguard's multiplayer when the game launches next month.
Earlier this week, the team at Sledgehammer showed off a little more of its campaign with the release of a new trailer and a subsequent behind-the-scenes look at how Vanguard's story came to be. In other Call of Duty news, Activision recently spoke further about the upcoming anti-cheat set to be released alongside Vanguard. The company says that its new system is called Ricochet, and is designed to combat hackers in the game using kernel-level monitors.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.