Gun historian left speechless by CoD: Vanguard’s “silly” weapons

Call of Duty: Vanguard is set during World War II and its guns are inspired by that period.  Testing just how much that inspiration was stretched, a firearms historian broke down just how “silly” some of the game’s loadouts are.

The Royal Armouries is the United Kingdom’s National Museum of Arms and Armour. As such, their Keeper of Firearms and Artillery, Jonathan Ferguson, is about as well-versed in historical weaponry as anyone.

So, who better to judge Call of Duty on the historical accuracy of Vanguard’s guns? You, or your history-buff friends, may have already noticed some… timeline inconsistencies. But Ferguson certainly has a keener eye than most.

Analyzing customized loadouts for guns like the M1 Garand, Sten, and M1928 — the historian broke down where CoD went right and, more often than not, incredibly wrong.

Gun historian exposes “silly” Call of Duty Vanguard guns

To be fair, Sledgehammer Games did decide to give each weapon 10 attachment slots this year. So there is a lot of additional room to go wrong. One such attachment was problematic for Ferguson, practically across all weapons: the grip tape.

As he explained, there’s a lot of “21st century grip tape” used on these WW2 guns in the Rear Grip slot. And… that type of material simply didn’t exist back then, so it’s a bit odd. 

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Similarly, he was not a fan of the game’s reticles, or as he called them: “heinous optical sights.” He elaborated that “we can barely make optical sights with a field of view like this now, so we certainly didn’t have them in the 1940s.”

Ferguson also gave some more-specific critiques. For the Sten, he noted that the gun seems to be a mesh of multiple different types of original and experimental Stens. For the M1 Garand, he wondered why the traditional “ping” sound when the magazine emptied was actually… not accompanied by anything dropping out.

Although there were some “ahistorical” abominations that left him speechless, not all of Ferguson’s reactions were negative. 

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While Vanguard’s 10-attachment Gunsmith allows for some outlandish setups, the base versions of each weapon aren’t horrendous. As Ferguson summarized about the AS44, “it looks pretty good … well-modeled, well-textured.”