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Call of Duty Vanguard's subreddit has taken to poking fun at the upcoming game's audio design by claiming that it is "historically accurate".
COD Vanguard recently ran an open beta for players to jump into the fray and test out their multiplayer skills. As well as giving fans the chance to get to grips with some of the Vanguard's new features, the beta also allowed developer Sledgehammer Games to receive feedback on a number of the game's elements.
One such feature that players felt didn't live up to expectations was Vanguard's audio, with many players highlighting that it lacked a certain punchiness and often sounded muted. This prompted a response from Reddit user ian2345 who jested that the developer's decisions in terms of sound design must have been to preserve historical accuracy.
"This game is supposed to take place in 1945 towards the end of the war/after the war was over," says ian2345 in a post on Vanguard's subreddit. "As such, it makes sense that after years of fighting, most of the soldiers have severe hearing damage from having a lack of hearing protection. This is portrayed accurately as our character in the game can obviously not hear very well and all of the weapons sound tinny to him and everything sounds muted. I did not expect this attention to detail and I say bravo to you guys for making sure we feel fully immersed that way."
While Sledgehammer Games is far from admitting that its choice in sound design came down to mimicking the damaged ears of veteran WW2 soldiers, the developer told fans during the beta that it was "aware of volume and mixing issues" and that it is "hard at work balancing everything for launch to fix bugs related to weapon audio, atmospheric audio, and more."
Call of Duty: Vanguard is the next game in the annual Call of Duty Franchise. Developer Sledgehammer Games previously released Call of Duty: WW2 in 2017 and is returning to the setting for this year's game as well. Albeit Sledgehammer is taking a more story-driven approach and the campaign will focus on a proto-Special Forces unit towards the end of the war.
In other Call of Duty Vanguard news, numerous reports suggest that the game may already be facing hacker problems. Numerous videos circulating social media across the Vanguard beta appeared to show the all-too-familiar sight of hackers navigating the map with automatic lock-on aim cheats enabled.
Last month, we learned that Activision is working on a "multi-faceted, new anti-cheat system" set to debut alongside Warzone's upcoming pacific-themed map while it also looks like those with an account or hardware ban in Warzone will be subsequently banned from Vanguard. Although the sight of cheaters in Vanguard's beta is not one to be celebrated, at least fans can hold on to the knowledge that Call of Duty's new anti-cheat wasn't deployed for the event, meaning that there's still hope to clear up the franchise's hacking problem moving forward.
Hackers have arrived on the Vanguard Beta 👍 pic.twitter.com/zJs1q4xAUW
— CDL Intel (@INTELCallofDuty) September 18, 2021
For more on Sledgehammer's upcoming installment, make sure to check out our Call of Duty Vanguard page for a range of news, features, and trailers for the game.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.