If there’s a new Call of Duty game, it’s inevitable that it will be someone’s year.
The ongoing trend in Call of Duty esports — could even call it a meme — is for players to announce how the upcoming season is already theirs.
“It’s my year,” or something to that effect. “I think this could be my year.”
In all reality, only one Call of Duty League team will win the 2022 world championship, and Dallas Empire stars Anthony “Shotzzy” Cuevas-Castro and Indervir “iLLeY” Dhaliwal certainly want that. Making that happen will be about dominating the ups and downs of the upcoming Call of Duty: Vanguard, which releases Nov. 5.
Cuevas-Castro and Dhaliwal played the Vanguard beta basically from the moment they woke up until deep into the night for a week. They had their opinions on what could be adjusted. Dhaliwal wants to see the time-to-kill adjusted so players aren’t taken out so easily, but knew it’d be on them to create a championship season.
“The one thing I would take from last year is communication just in terms of in the game and out of the game,” said Cuevas-Castro, the 2020 CDL MVP. “I want everyone on the same page with the gameplay and work for that each day. For myself I still need to work on comms. It’s not my best trait so far but it’s gotten better throughout the years.”
The Empire won’t look the exact same as the first two seasons of the league. It’s still the CDL team in Dallas, but talks of Envy Gaming (which owns the Empire) and OpTic Gaming being merged into one team blew up the offseason rostermania.
That hasn’t developed any further officially, and neither of the Empire players were able to comment on the offseason moves. But those two are the only ones on the roster for now. Were Envy to acquire the OpTic brand, the most obvious additions to Dallas would be Seth “Scump” Abner and Brandon “Dashy” Otell.
ITS MY YEAR. pic.twitter.com/PRUU9QHbgj
— OpTic Scump (@scump) September 10, 2021
Dallas is no stranger to drastic roster changes.
Ian “Crimsix” Porter, the winningest player in the history of the esport and three-time world champion, announced his unrestricted free agency along with Reece “Vivid” Drost right after Champs.
“It’s never easy and never does get easy,” Dhaliwal said. “Sometimes you have to do what is in the best interest for the team and we thought that not having Porter was the best thing for the team.”
It wasn’t meant as a slight to Porter. Cuevas-Castro felt Porter was critical in helping the Empire learn the new games and providing veteran experience. But Porter himself admitted he wasn’t the best teammate on his own Twitch stream.
Not to get away from Vanguard too much, because Dallas is still looking to a new year. Cuevas-Castro has played many hours of Warzone, which has similar movement to Vanguard as they are both on the same engine.
Moving different on resurgence 😁 pic.twitter.com/IRYWMFTgy2
— OpTic Shotzzy (@Shotzzy) September 5, 2021
Dhaliwal said the movement isn’t the exact same though.
“Basically in Modern Warfare and Warzone you could tactical sprint, slide cancel and then tactical sprint again,” Dhaliwal said. “But in Vanguard there’s a delay between sliding and that second tactical sprint. I think that’s kind of dope. I think they put it in on purpose just to get rid of the slide cancel spam.”
Cuevas-Castro admitted he has fun on any type of FPS game, no matter the state of the beta. He’s played the Halo: Infinite beta recently as well, but his focus still remains on professional Call of Duty.
Dallas may not have its team set. There are plenty of unknowns that will have to be solved before Vanguard’s release. But what Dallas does have is two young stars looking to make 2022 their year.
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