The Biggest Changes In The Call Of Duty: Vanguard - Season 2 Reloaded Update

"Call of Duty: Vanguard" has been an interesting case. Even before the game's release, there was a lot of concern about cheating among the community due to it being prevalent in the beta. The release itself was pretty rocky, with modes such as Search & Destroy being borderline broken in "Call of Duty: Vanguard" in addition to other issues, such as the game being released for public consumption without ranked play. Even if critical reviews were mostly positive for the gameplay as a whole, many players considered the game to be broken when it first hit stores and digital marketplaces.

Despite these early issues, Sledgehammer Games — the developer behind the game — has attempted to gradually fix "Call of Duty: Vanguard" and make it a more complete and balanced experience for longtime fans of the "Call of Duty" series.  The game's second season, titled "Reloaded," unleashed several gameplay changes, fixes, and additionsfor players. But what exactly is new in Season 2? Let's take a look through the patch notes and point out the biggest changes in the "Call of Duty: Vanguard – Season 2 Reloaded" update.

Unless you're a first-person shooter virtuoso capable of indiscriminately wiping out opponents with just the flick of your wrist or thumb, it's more than likely that you rely upon a slight aim assist to aid your gameplay. This is pretty much standard in the FPS space, and "Call of Duty" is no different. Unfortunately, many players reported that the aim assist feature in "Call of Duty: Vanguard" wasn't always working as it should, a complaint that has reverberated to other "Call of Duty" titles as well. According to Sledgehammer, this issue has been fixed.

As noted in the patch notes, the issue involving aim assist was the result of a bug where it would "intermittently deactivate while engaging an enemy player", meaning that players were being forced into aiming manually even when actively engaged in combat. This was due to the game's "player visibility check" — the function which determines player position — not recognizing opposing players when running an action. Sledgehammer claims its team has "tested this fix extensively" but that it can only truly be tested in a live playing environment.

Despite "Call of Duty" being a run-and-gun experience on a collection of compact maps, sniper rifles are still historically popular in the game due to their stopping power from both medium and long-range. Quickscoping — the act of swiftly aiming down the sights and attempting to kill an opponent — in particular is an extremely popular practice with this class of weapon. Unfortunately, snipers haven't had much fun in "Call of Duty: Vanguard," apparently due to the increased time it takes to zoom down the sights. Sledgehammer seems to have addressed this issue.

According to the patch notes, the developer has decreased the ADS time for two rifles in particular — the Type 99 and Kar98k. The 3-Line Rifle also received an update that decreases "the flinch received when taking fire to allow players to maintain accuracy while holding a position." This is to ensure players aren't completely put off when under enemy fire and can still competently aim in high-pressure situations. These changes were made when Sledgehammer "recognized that sniper rifles were underperforming across the board."

A variation of the traditional Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed is a similar multiplayer-based war of attrition where players have to kill as many enemies as they can. However, there's a catch to this process — Kill Confirmed is more than just collecting kills, as players must also retrieve dog tags dropped by slain enemies in order to pick up all 10 possible points per kill. Unfortunately, Kill Confirmed was temporarily removed from "Call of Duty: Vanguard" due to an error that would apparently cause lobbies to disconnect. This server issue could also cause the game to completely crash.

This error with servers disconnecting has finally been corrected as Season Two of "Call of Duty: Vanguard" will see Kill Confirmed return to the quickplay list. The return of Kill Confirmed should be a welcome addition for longtime fans who enjoy Team Deathmatch as a concept, but not the camping that comes with it.

In a departure from the series' roots as a small-space shooter, it seems that Sledgehammer has begun taking pages out of the book of EA's "Battlefield" as the game will be introducing a new mode called Arms Race in which players wage war against each other on larger-scale maps, similar to another "Call of Duty" mode called Ground War which has also emulated "Battlefield"-style gameplay in the past. To accommodate this new mode, a new map called Alps has also been introduced.

Arms Race hasn't had much time in the sun to this point, but already, "Call of Duty: Vanguard" players have had strong reactions to it in various ways. One Reddit thread asserted that the OP liked the mode, saying that it feels like "Warzone and Ground War had an artic baby." Others, however, aren't as thrilled with it. In response to the initial positive remarks, user u/Srom said that "[t]he mode doesn't look or even seem interesting to me at all."

The jury is still out on whether Arms Race will be a positive addition to "Vanguard" or not. But at the very least, it's something new.