The alpha of Call of Duty: Vanguard was played by various professionals. They had a lot of fun, but also some frustration. The culprit is the exploding bullets, which in their current form don’t seem to be enjoyable at all.
Who played? The two professionals Seth “Scump” Abner and former CoD world champion Matthew “FormaL” Piper extensively played the alpha of CoD Vanguard and rocked Champion’s Hill up and down. And even though they apparently had visible fun, one feature really annoyed them: Exploding bullets!
These belong, for example, to a specific weapon, the “Frankengun”, which can be purchased at the support station with cash as a scorestreak. In return, you get an oversized machine gun that fires exploding projectiles at high speed and covers large areas with deadly explosions.
We are embedding gameplay of the Death Machine here; you can find it around 7:50 minutes:
In the alpha, the explosive projectiles could also be obtained through upgrades on other weapons. So they were quite common on the battlefield.
Exploding bullets obscure vision “I can’t see anything!”
What is the problem with the explosive projectiles? The exploding projectiles cause more damage than regular bullets and also have a small effect radius in which they deal less damage. But that’s not the only problem Scump and FormaL had with the new projectiles.
Rather, the projectiles obscure the vision of all opponents caught in the explosions. The more explosive projectiles hit around you, the less you see, and that becomes a problem when you want to defend against the fire but can’t even tell where you’re being shot from.
What were the reactions? Scump was caught in the final round of a trio match and was so heavily hit by the projectiles that he couldn’t see anything and in the end was helplessly shot down like the last noob.
This did not go down well, and he tweeted about his defeat.
In the video, he expresses his frustration about the projectiles, saying multiple times, “What the hell is that supposed to be? I can’t even see him!”
There was also similar feedback in the comments from former colleague FormaL. He said (probably not entirely seriously): “It’s going to be a good year to skip out.”
Will anything change? Since Alpha tests like these are done in games to check poorly functioning features among other things, there could still be various changes before the launch on November 5, 2021. Perhaps the exploding projectiles will be nerfed by then or removed entirely from the game.
Also, colleague Maik Schneider, who was allowed to take a look at the alpha of CoD Vanguard, also complained that the visibility was often not optimal.
