Activision Blizzard’s latest marketing ploy is now to make us believe that the graphics in Call of Duty: Vanguard are so realistic that they can fool even photographers…

So here’s a senior marketing executive from the publisher called Fernando Machado, who says, “Call of Duty: Vanguard captures the epic intimacy of World War II in an incredibly immersive manner.” Even at this statement, one could stop to ask, “what was he thinking here?”, but hopefully he was close enough to chuckle at what he said himself.

But a pair of photojournalists were given “special camera-like portals [to enter] into the game engine itself” (which is the IW engine, hopefully with only a hint of its origins, as the technology was initially built from id Tech 3, the Quake III Arena engine), so they took pictures as if they were capturing actual conflicts. One of them, Sebastiano Tomada Piccolomini (a war reporter; his colleague was Alex Tonga), said, “As photographers, this is what conflict looks like-”

Four pictures were taken and are for sale by Activision Blizzard. The money raised from the prints will help veterans in the United States find “high-quality employment” through the Call of Duty Endowment programme. The publisher can say that it is trying to help despite accusations of grossness, but let’s not forget that this is one of the most successful franchises in the world, and one that is published every year, so if they could, they could give all these veterans a great job straight away. (Especially with CEO Bobby Kotick getting bonuses in the millions of dollars a year…)

The four images are priced at $515 each. Still, the whole marketing is only a stumbling block for the publisher, presumably what Activision Blizzard was aiming for with the game coming out on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PC (Battle.net), PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on November 5th…

Source: PCGamer