14 DAY TRIAL // Publisher Activision Blizzard has already confirmed that a new Call of Duty video game is being prepared for the fall of 2012 and developer Sledgehammer Games seems to be involved in its creation, judging by a new job ad that the company put out.
The listing talks about “an unannounced high-end console title” but then also mentions that the people who are hired will be working with the “Call of Duty development team” at Sledgehammer.
The main focus of the new job will be to work on the Call of Duty multiplayer modes and take the “online experience to a new level” and create “multiplayer game modes and online community features”.
Traditionally development work on the yearly Call of Duty titles alternated between two studios, Infinity Ward and Treyarch.
Activision broke the pattern for Modern Warfare 3, where both Sledgehammer Games and Raven worked alongside Infinity Ward on some parts of the game.
The 2012 Call of Duty title does not yet have a confirmed main developer.
Sledgehammer Games was working on a third person game that would also be part of the Call of Duty series at one point but Activision suspended work on the project and it’s not clear whether the game will ever be completed and released.
A pair of veterans of the original Dead Space development process created the new Sledgehammer studio and they are still interested in developing their own intellectual property.
The Call of Duty series is the biggest franchise for Activision and the company is eager to make sure that each release continues to break sales records created by the previous installment.
Most of the success is linked to the multiplayer game modes, which is based around easy to pick up but hard to master mechanics and comes complete with a lot of options linked to characters advancement and game rewards.