Call of Duty: Vanguard has just received a massive new update that completely overhauls the game's spawn system. Spawns in Vanguard have been one of the game's major issues, resurrecting the problems of Modern Warfare (2019), but after this latest update, the situation is very different. In this article, we'll explain Call of Duty: Vanguard's huge new update overhauling spawns.
How Spawns Used to Work in Call of Duty
In most Call of Duty games is a respawn system that works on a few pretty simple principles. In short, there are a number of zones on each map where players can spawn: These are usually at either end of a map with additional zones in the center. At the beginning of a match, each team spawns in their default spawn zone.
When a player dies, the game will do a check to see if there are any enemies nearby their default spawn zone or watching their default spawn zone, and if an enemy is there, the game will spawn the player in a different zone. Spawns flip when you get deep enough into an enemy's spawn zone such that the game can't find any safe spaces in the zone to spawn in enemies in that zone.
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Spawn trapping in Call of Duty is about finding a spot far away enough from the enemy spawn zone so as not to flip it and allow enemies to spawn in the zone but close enough to the spawn zone where you can easily take enemies down quickly after they spawn in. It's a delicate balance, and oftentimes, teammates can accidentally flip a spawn, making it relatively easy to escape a spawn trap.
Naturally, this system doesn't work flawlessly, and it never has. Sometimes, particularly on small maps, spawns can be slow to flip, causing one team to spawn in endlessly in front of the other team that just mows them down. Sometimes, spawns can flip too quickly, displacing members of a team across a map and ruining the flow of combat or any hope of map control.
Accordingly, spawns in each Call of Duty game receive regular tuning as players figure out how to exploit and manipulate spawns to get as many kills as possible. By a few months after launch, most modes in most Call of Duty games work well enough in terms of spawning, though there are always issues the smaller the map is.
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How Spawns Used to Work in Vanguard
In Vanguard, spawns worked similar to how they worked in Modern Warfare (2019): Instead of a traditional spawn system, Vanguard and Modern Warfare rely on a squad-spawn system somewhat similar to how Battlefield games handle spawning.
Essentially, rather than spawning in players dependent on how close they were to an enemy or what an enemy could see, the game would try to spawn in players with teammates or as close to teammates as possible, grouping players together.
On paper, at a glance, this might not sound so bad, keeping members of a team together when they spawn back in after dying. The problem is that this spawn system works like the traditional spawn system does when spawns flip far too quickly. Squad-spawns make it so that players on both teams are constantly spawning in across the map.
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It's very difficult to maintain map control or watch a particular lane or even have a smooth gameplay flow when players are everywhere and anywhere and after spawning in it just being a matter of time before you get shot by someone from some angle you could never have anticipated because people are spawning in all around you.
This system in Vanguard isn't as bad as it was in Modern Warfare (2019) because Modern Warfare had a lot of design decisions that sort of reinforced this issue, compacting it, and making it feel even worse than it was itself, while Vanguard walks some of these more unpopular design choices back, but spawns in the game working like this have been a serious issue since launch.
Vanguard's Spawn Update Explained
Now, spawns in Vanguard work more like traditional Call of Duty across all maps and modes (including Ranked) in Vanguard. Now, spawns are dependent on how close an enemy player is and if an enemy is watching a spawn. Accordingly, the flow of gameplay across all maps and modes is much improved.
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Unfortunately, spawn problems in Vanguard are definitely not over, but this is now more of a reflection of how spawns in Call of Duty work rather than Sledgehammer doing anything wrong. This comes down to the fact that Vanguard lets you pack tons of players into small maps, and there isn't a good, fair way to spawn players into a game like that.
Inevitably, people will spawn in front of enemies, spawns will be too slow to flip and cause a horrifying cycle of spawning in and dying immediately, and all kinds of issues will never go away, particularly in the context of the smallest, most densely-packed maps and modes in the game.
However, spawns in Vanguard do work a lot better now, and now there's much more predictability to spawns, so you'll spend less time, in general, wandering around maps expecting people to pop out at you from anywhere and simply hoping you'll be able to take them down before they take you down.
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Now it's a lot more viable to tactically position yourself or even pull of a flank without spawns wildly flipping all over the place throughout that process, inevitability dooming you to the fate of being shot in the back by some freshly spawned-in player.
Plus, we can expect these new spawns to receive lots of map-to-map, and mode-to-mode, tweaking in the coming months as players experience them and find out the system's quirks and failings in particular maps or modes.
Ultimately, this kind of change is what gamers have been asking for in Modern Warfare (2019) for literal years, and Infinity Ward has never done anything, and it's not even a sure thing we'll see squad-spawns totally eliminated in Modern Warfare II (2022) yet. However, a few months in, Vanguard has completely overhauled its spawn system, and Sledgehammer games do deserve credit for that.
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Not everything is known about the new spawn system just yet since it's so new, so we can expect more developments and thoughts to come in the coming days and weeks as this update is experienced by everyone with a copy of Vanguard still interested in playing.
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