Call of Duty: Vanguard has already impressed fans with its gameplay trailers and Champion Hill alpha. The game releases in November of this year, however, fans will be able to get their hands on it prior to its official release through Vanguard's beta in mid-September. Call of Duty: Vanguard sees the series return to its World War 2 roots, and fans have already seen a small section of the campaign.
Call of Duty: Vanguard’s beta will focus on multiplayer, but Call of Duty fans may be eager to learn more about Vanguard’s story following the enthralling Gamescom Opening Night Live demo. While the gameplay section was imbued with Call of Duty’s classic over the top action set pieces, the lethality of the protagonist in this demo may not have been overstated. One of the main characters of Call of Duty: Vanguard, Polina Petrova is actually based on a real person nicknamed "Lady Death," and the story of her service in World War 2 is fascinating.
Call of Duty: Vanguard’s Stalingrad Gameplay
To this point, fans have received a lot of gameplay footage from Call of Duty: Vanguard. Not least of all in Vanguard's multiplayer reveal event, which highlighted a number of new features and modes. However, for the Call of Duty fan who is more concerned with the solo campaign experience, Vanguard’s Stalingrad demo may have been the most exciting footage released yet. This gameplay demo featured a mission from Call of Duty: Vanguard’s campaign, depicting the German invasion of Stalingrad. This is an exciting sneak peek into what can be expected from this year’s Call of Duty campaign offering, and the early signs are pretty promising.
Call of Duty: Vanguard’s Stalingrad demo featured Assassins Creed-style climbing, Call of Duty’s new blind fire mechanic, and a lot of the chaos that can be expected from Vanguard’s campaign. The demo begins as the invasion is in full swing, with the player awakening in a crumbling building infested with German soldiers. Initially, the player poses as a civilian, and is directed into a room by German soldiers. However, she soon escapes and begins making her way through Stalingrad, killing Nazis as she goes.
The protagonist in this trailer is Polina Petrova, a fictional character who shows exceptional climbing abilities and expertise with a sniper in hand. What becomes immediately clear to fans watching the Stalingrad demo is that the protagonist for Call of Duty: Vanguard is very resilient, seemingly to an unrealistic extent. However, the real-life inspiration for Polina Petrova proved to be equally as resistant to death.
Who is Call of Duty: Vanguard’s Deadly Sniper?
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Call of Duty: Vanguard’s Polina Petrova is based on Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Ukrainian woman, who was one of the Soviet Union’s 2,000 female snipers during World War 2. As may be expected, Lyudmila faced a challenge in becoming a Soviet sniper, with her recruiter urging her to become a nurse instead. However, Lyudmila had become proficient with a rifle in hand after joining a shooting club at 14, and was able to convince the recruiter of her merit in combat by displaying her many medals.
Unfortunately, Lyudmila would not be given a rifle upon joining the army due to the Soviet Union’s weapon shortages, instead, she was sent into combat with nothing but a grenade. Lyudmila would eventually pick up a rifle from a fallen soldier, just as Polina Petrova had in Call of Duty: Vanguard’s gameplay demo, and soon killed her first two enemy soldiers. An experience that Lyudmila has since described as her “Baptism by fire.”
What had prompted Lyudmila to enroll with the Soviet army was Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Despite being in her fourth year of university, she was one of the first people to enroll, as her school was destroyed by the Nazi’s invasion. This invasion was what first brought the war to her doorstep. Call of Duty: Vanguard’s gameplay demo picks up over a year later, as Polina Petrova is much more experienced. In real life, Lyudmila Pavlichenko had seen the last of frontline combat due to being injured by a Mortar Shell.
To that point, Lyudmila Pavlichenko had killed 309 enemy soldiers and had been the subject of numerous threats and even bribes by the Nazis, who were desperate to see the back of Lyudmila. While it seems Call of Duty: Vanguard’s setting falls after Lyudmila’s service, the parallels between Polina and Lyudmila are clear.
After being honorably discharged from service, Lyudmila Pavlichenko was sent to the US to tell her story. It was thought that her inspirational story would motivate the American population to get involved in World War 2. However, Lyudmila was met with misogyny in the media. Rather than asking questions about her life and service, journalists would ask questions about her makeup, or her thoughts on the unflattering army uniform.
These questions enraged the then first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who would strike up a friendship with Lyudmila so fierce that she would later visit Lyudmila in Moscow during cold war tensions. It doesn’t seem as though Call of Duty: Vanguard’s story will cover this element of Lyudmila’s story, as Lyudmila and Polina are not the same person. That being said, this section of Lyudmila’s service was seen as highly valuable despite her poor reception in the United States.
Sniping in Call of Duty: Vanguard
Call of Duty: Vanguard’s snipers look set to play a large role in the game’s campaign. Just as Lyudmila was a sharpshooter, Polina Petrova shows her worth with a rifle in both scoped and iron sight forms. Lyudmila was nicknamed "Lady Death" for her sniping abilities, and it seems that with Call of Duty returning to a World War 2 setting, snipers and single-shot rifles will once again be a popular choice in Vanguard.
Quick-scoping was on show in Call of Duty: Vanguard’s multiplayer reveal trailer. In the past, fans have complained about sniping in Call of Duty, arguing that in the wrong hands, a sniper can become an insta-death tool. However, in a World War 2 game, snipers are likely to feature quite heavily. Also, due to Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s link to Call of Duty: Vanguard’s campaign, it’s fitting that sniping would once again be a prominent playstyle. After all, Lyudmila is statistically the most successful female sniper in recorded history, as well as just one of 500 surviving Soviet female snipers to survive World War 2.
Call of Duty: Vanguard launches November 5 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.