It was announced earlier in the week that Call of Duty is now on a three-year cycle between three development teams. That alone gave hope to the series breaking free of its stagnation, as if calling it “perhaps the best ever created” wasn’t enough. Now, plans for the first true next-gen title of the franchise are in the pipeline.
The PS4 and Xbox One will be lead platforms for the next Call of Duty title according to Sledgehammer Games’ Eric Hirshberg. He shared with IGN that the next Call of Duty release is being thoughtfully crafted and will harness the power of next-gen hardware. As such, the title is being developed with “next-gen-first development”, meaning it won’t be ported over from the PS3 and Xbox 360 like we saw with Call of Duty: Ghosts.
Hirshberg described Call of Duty: Ghosts‘ next-gen ports as challenging since the Xbox One and PS4 technologies were “still coming into focus”. The next-gen versions looked remarkably similar to what we’ve been seeing for nearly a decade because, well, all the assets were the same. That won’t be the case for 2014’s Call of Duty release.
Sledgehammer hopes that since this will be the first true next-gen Call of Duty, and one that can reinvigorate the series in the same way Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare did for the PS3 and Xbox 360. That’ll require a lot of creativity and risk. But really, Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 are proof that when the series is on its A-game, the result is well worth the investment.
