Call Of Duty Vanguard is cracking down on cheaters.
Ahead of the second weekend of its much anticipated Open Beta, lead designer Zach Hodgson confirmed in an interview with 9news.com.au: "We do have the anti-cheat measures in place for weekend two (in multiplayer)."
"We haven't been broadcasting this too far and wide yet," Mr Hodgson said.
"We do have a system in place where if we do find reports of people cheating during public beta weekend two, we can ban them instantly and they'll be locked out of the beta for the rest of the weekend."
"We can ban them in real time and just drop that hammer just to make sure that the experience is as balanced and fair for everybody else who's not cheating."
The Vanguard multiplayer Beta which is open from now until Tuesday had its first test run last weekend for PlayStation players and things could look and sound very different this weekend.
"We're taking a look at visibility, we're taking a look at audio, we're reviewing every YouTube channel upload, every comment, we have a lot of people internally that are scouring the internet as well," Mr Hodgson said.
"We had expectations that there are going to be people that really preferred 6v6 and some people that really liked Blitz.
"We pushed it a little bit with 14v14 in some of the smaller maps, like Hotel Royal and yeah, it's a very intense experience."
A more natural, destructible environment is a big feature of this new Call Of Duty, and even its lead designer was surprised by how quickly players adapted.
"I watched several people on stream or in videos that were just naturally poking holes to kind of scout, or they were taking fights through the walls," he said.
"There were certain people getting sight lines that I've never even thought about getting on some of these maps and trying to post up from certain angles.
"We've been playing these maps throughout the entire course of development, and I've never seen anybody use those angles until you see them in the wild and these people are really finding new ways to use the maps, which is really exciting."
While the glory of 4K gameplay on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X is the showcase, Adam Iscove, the game's Senior Development Director, is spending plenty of time optimising the game for last-gen hardware.
"We were seeing some issues with PS4 specifically on weekend one so the engineering team is taking a hard look at that, just to make sure that we minimise packet loss or any latency issues as much as possible as we head toward launch," Mr Iscove said.
"(Sledgehammer Games based in Melbourne) have been absolutely instrumental to this entire development process.
"Some of the maps that they've been working on are some of my personal favourites, just the unique look and play style for those that came out of the Melbourne studio that will be available at launch are really exciting.
"They did one of our remastered maps, Castle from World at War... (I'm) so excited for players to get their hands on that, as well as some of the newer ones that they've been working on."
Call Of Duty Vanguard won't officially launch until November 5, 2021.
Players can get their hands on it early during the Open Beta this weekend, beginning on 17 September AEST/NZST.
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- Friday 17 Sept @ 03:00 AM AEST / 05:00 AM NZST – Open for PlayStation, pre- order required for Xbox and PC
- Sunday 19 Sept @ 03:00 AM AEST / 05:00 AM NZST – Open for all players
- Tuesday 21 Sept @ 03:00 AM AEST / 05:00 AM NZST – Beta end.
