What Is Global Special Forces in Call of Duty: Vanguard?

Vanguard global special forces
Oh, this guy looks beefy. A beefy global-special-forces-boy. | © Activision

Global Special Forces, also known as Special Operation Task Forces (SOTF), are a new set of multiplayer squad features in Call of Duty: Vanguard. It's a complicated new system, but looks very promising. What are Vanguard's Global Special Forces? Here's everything you need to know about the new Global Special Forces features in Call of Duty: Vanguard, and how they work.

Call of Duty: Vanguard is doing away with Factions, and shifting to a more Team A vs. Team B approach for multiplayer. There's more to it than just that, though, with Sledgehammer Games introducing something that they are calling Special Operation Task Forces. We have seen it in action with the Vanguard Alpha and the ongoing beta, and we're here to breakdown everything we know about Vanguard's new Global Special Forces.

What is Global Special Forces in Call of Duty: Vanguard?

Global Special Forces takes the personalities of Vanguard's campaign and plops them in multiplayer, to birth a new kind of competitive play. Instead of your standard Factions approach to multiplayer, Sledgehammer Games has chosen to introduce Special Operation Task Forces. This new system combines with Operation Progression, a set of upgrades for each Operator. These upgrades unlock cosmetic items such as charms based on their various backstories and unique finishing moves.

The focus this time around is on not only trained soldiers and fighters, but also those who fought on the Home Front, and the forgotten heroes of World War 2. These Operators were "plucked from their home" and put in a situation where they had to fight. It looks super fascinating, and a fantastic way to form these new Special Operation Task Forces as part of Vanguard's Global Special Forces.

This is all getting a tad confusing. Let's take a step back from Call of Duty: Vanguard's new Global Special Forces, and take a closer look at Vanguard itself. Here's the latest...

What Are Special Operation Task Forces in Call of Duty: Vanguard?

Vanguard's Special Operation Task Forces are a team consisting of personalities from the campaign, pulled together by Butcher to form Ragtag teams of elite soldiers. The whole thing looks insanely wild, and has been proven effective with the selection of six operators in the beta. We will be receiving twelve operators at launch, each from different walks of life, and each brought together by Captain Butcher, who is returning from Call of Duty: WW2. It's exciting stuff, and it looks like Butcher is going to play a much bigger role this time around. His goal? To create a new kind of warfare.

How is Vanguard's Multiplayer Using Narrative?

Vanguard's goal is to take the characters of the Campaign and introduce them to multiplayer whilst staying true to their heritage and backstories. It's a noble pursuit, if you ask us, especially due to the huge diversity in stories and characters that we will allegedly be engaging with. Here's a quote from the Call of Duty: Vanguard Multiplayer reveal:

We want to champion, sort of, a lot of forgotten stories of the war, and a lot of them are female-led stories. There were a lot of women who had a part in the war, whether on the home front or out on the battlefield.

Diversity in particular seems to be a sticking point for Sledgehammer this time around, pointing out that it is "not just in terms of race, but also in their appearance, their gender...". They went on to establish that "all of that is explored more in MP".

I do think that there is a lot of opportunities for people to learn, like, new perspectives and new angles on things that happened during that time period...

We're not really sure what this is all going to lead to in practice. We saw it in action during the Call of Duty: Vanguard Beta especially, but at present it seems like a more glorified and deeper version of the standard Operators we already see in most Call of Duty games. Sledgehammer Games did, however, establish that they will explore each character's backstory when they are unlocked by the player. Will this be some kind of unlocking cutscene? Maybe text you can read to find out more? We'll have to wait and find out.

What we can be sure of, though, is that Call of Duty: Vanguard's Multiplayer is shaping up to be bloody good. We can't tell whether the new Global Special Forces in Vanguard, or the Special Operation Task Forces, will make a huge difference in practice, but if Sledgehammer Games gets this right then it could be absolutely incredible. Yet again, we'll have to wait to find out, and that wait is going to be bloody hard...

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Evan Williams

Australian gamer, musician, and journalist at EarlyGame. Currently living in Germany so no, I don't ride a Kangaroo to work. I am currently hard at work making our CoD and Rocket League pages the best on the internet. Lofty ambitions,...