So, when exactly can you jump in?
PlayStation players will have exclusive access to the first weekend of the Vanguard open beta, which runs from Sept. 10-13, before Xbox and PC owners jump in on Oct. 16-17. If you’re wondering what the actual start time for the Vanguard open beta is, servers will go live at 10 am PT/1 pm ET on Friday, according to Activision. The beta will run until Monday on both weekends, giving players ample time to get quite a few matches in.
Vanguard‘s single-player campaign tackles an alternate WWII history “what if” scenario where a special ops unit must foil the Nazi’s plan to find Adolf Hitler’s successor at the tail end of the war. The four main characters making up the squad trying to stop “Project Phoenix” are based on real-life soldiers who fought for the Allied Forces.
The game will also ship with a new multiplayer component, including 20 maps across the Western, Eastern, Pacific, and North African fronts of WWII. In a first for the franchise, Treyarch will provide a new Zombies mode for another studio’s Call of Duty game. Vanguard‘s Zombies mode is billed as “a crossover [that] connects with theCall of Duty: Black Ops Cold WarZombies storyline,” according to a press release. Activision confirms that Vanguard will build off of the Zombies lore established in Cold War. IGN revealed that the new mode will explore “the birth of the zombies.”
As for Warzone, Raven Studios is designing a brand-new map set in the Pacific — not just a re-skin of Verdansk — that ties into Vanguard. The mode “shares the same tech as Vanguard for seamless weapon and operator integration” and will also introduce a new “multi-faceted, anti-cheat system” that will hopefully help with many of Warzone‘s current hacker woes.
Those players hoping Vanguard‘s file size wouldn’t be quite as big as Cold War or Modern Warfare should brace themselves. According to the game’s listing on the Microsoft Store, you’ll need to 270.05 GB of storage to download and play the full release of Vanguard.