We’re fairly accustomed to seeing a new Call of Duty game emerge every year, and this year will probably be no different. After all, Activision Blizzard’s CEO Bobby Kotick had already confirmed our beliefs last fall, when he stated that “We also expect to launch new Call of Duty and Skylanders titles and a major new potential franchise with Bungie’s Destiny”. Supposedly, two studios were already working on Call of Duty titles back then: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 co-creators Sledgehammer Games and Treyarch, the makers of Call of Duty: World at War and the Call of Duty: Black Ops franchise.
Infinity Ward, the guys behind Call of Duty: Ghosts (which was a huge success, at least financially) are sitting this year out, it seems. Sledgehammer is taking over this year, and their recent LinkedIn activity suggests that they are expanding their team for their upcoming Call of Duty game. They are recruiting personnel for multiple positions, as follows:
- Office Assistant (temporary)
- Core Engineer
- Production Coordinator (temporary)
- Senior Animator (temporary)
- Level Designer (temporary)
- Senior Character Artist (temporary)
- Executive Assistant (temporary)
- Senior Material Artist
- Environment Artist (temporary)
- Multiplayer Designer (temporary)
- Development Director
- Concept Artist (temporary)
- Operations Manager
- Senior FX Artist (temporary)
- Weapons & Vehicle Artist (temporary)
Now, our purpose is not to turn into a recruiting agency. However, all these openings seem to point at a Call of Duty production, and given the fact that most jobs are for a temporary period, it’s only logical to assume that they need the manpower for one single project, at least for now. And, mind you, all these listings appeared on the same day, the 13th of January 2014 (with the exception of the Weapons & Vehicle Artist, which showed up 3 days earlier).
As far as the game is concerned, Activision has stated that the next Call of Duty title will provide a “fresh new AAA aural experience”, will aim for “hyper-realism” and will be a truly “next-gen” game. The next-gen part would suggest a Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC release. A lack of support for the new generation of consoles would make no sense financially, after all. Recent statistics have shown that Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 game sales are starting to drop, while Playstation 4 and Xbox One titles are selling better and better.
The hyper-realism part sounds appealing as well, because, let’s face it, the last Call of Duty titles weren’t known about their accurate depiction of reality. As far as the triple-A experience is concerned, we can only hope that it will be true. I don’t want to come off as a skeptic, but Sledgehammer’s Modern Warfare 3 wasn’t the best of the series, and there has been a constant decline in the quality of Call of Duty games lately. Giving Sledgehammer the benefit of the doubt, I’m hoping that they will manage to provide the series with a much-needed qualitative boost!