Call of Duty: Vanguard looks to be an explosive and exciting new entry in the longrunning FPS series. Besides the PlayStation-exclusive content, those who are planning on playing Call of Duty: Vanguard on PS5 will have some additional DualSense features to look forward to.
For almost two decades, Call of Duty has been a titan in the console FPS market, its tight gunplay and military aesthetic drawing in millions of players around the world yearly. How fast someone can flick the trigger is many times the difference between victory and defeat in Call of Duty, and with last year's Black Ops Cold War, on PS5, this took on a whole new meaning. Thanks to the revolutionary DualSense controller, the simple act of playing became an experience unto itself, as the rumble effects in the controller would match what was happening in-game, and using different weapons required varying degrees of pressure to pull the trigger.
In a new PlayStation Blog post, Sledgehammer Games shines light on how Call of Duty: Vanguard will use the DualSense controller on PS5. Chris Fowler, Principal Engineer at Sledgehammer Games, pens the article, which focuses on "the art of the trigger pull" and "the sensations of combat." Sledgehammer Games wanted to accurately recreate the feeling of the game's iconic weaponry, with the team using the DualSense's adaptive triggers to modify the amount of pressure necessary during the "break" of the trigger pull, as well simulate the weight of lifting a weapon while aiming-down-sights. However, the adaptive trigger settings of the DualSense can be disabled in settings if desired.
As for "the sensations of combat," Sledgehammer Games has made the DualSense an integral part of immersing players in the game. "With the help of haptic feedback in the DualSense controller [the player] will feel the action happening around them pulse through their hands and traverse up their arms," Fowler writes. They provide some examples, like feeling the shattering of debris around the player while shooting from cover, or while the Luftwaffe fires down on the player as in the Stalingrad Call of Duty: Vanguard trailer, intense and pinpoint rumbles coursing through the controller.
Those who played Black Ops Cold War on PS5 should recognize these DualSense capabilities as they were present in similar forms there. Games like Returnal and Astro's Playroom have shown the possibilities of the DualSense with its rumble features, like the light, snappy taps of running on metal, or feeling wind in the controller with directionality; it seems like Vanguard will continue to iterate on these concepts. It is also good of Vanguard to make its trigger effects optional as for some, the immersive qualities are just not that important to them, and further, have negatively impacted how some players perform.
Call of Duty: Vanguard launches November 5 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: PlayStation