14 DAY TRIAL // Publisher Activision Blizzard has confirmed that it plans to launch a new Call of Duty video game at some point during the second half of 2011, with the announcement coming after the company has announced better than expected revenue and profits for the third fiscal quarter of this year.
Eric Hirshberg, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Activision Publishing, has stated, “We will launch a new first-person action title during the back half of 2011”, with Thomas Tippl, the Chief Operations Officer of the company, adding, “Next year's Call of Duty will be a first-person shooter.”
Activision has not said who the developer of this new Call of Duty video game could be.
The likeliest suspect is Infinity Ward, which is apparently working on Modern Warfare 3, since the beginning of the current year.
But the developer has lost some of its most important people after founders Zampella and Jones left the company to work with Electronic Arts, which might mean that a new Modern Warfare won't be as engaging as the second installment in the series.
Another possibility is that Activision is giving Infinity Ward more development time and plugging the gap with a title from Sledgehammer Games, a new studio made up of veterans that have worked on the first Dead Space title.
Sledgehammer was initially said to be working on a third person title which would bring Call of Duty into the adventure game genre but since then information has leaked suggesting that it is also preparing a first person shooter.
This week Activision will launch the Treyarch made Call of Duty: Black Ops, which is set to take place during the Cold War and will offer a more emotional narrative than other titles in the franchise.
The game has seen strong pre orders and the company is expecting it to sell more than Modern Warfare 2 did in the same period of last year.