It’s probably not that big a surprise to hear, but it turns out that Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare didn’t strike the right cord with fans, and Activision are to take a different course with this year’s entry in the venerable first person shooter series.
During last night’s earnings call, Activision COO Thomas Tippl said, “In 2017, Activision will take Call of Duty back to its roots, and traditional combat will once again take centre stage. This is what our dedicated community of Call of Duty players and Sledgehammer Games, who has been developing this year’s title, are the most excited about.”
Further to that, CEO Eric Hirshberg said, “Last year I don’t think we got that balance right. Infinite Warfare had a ton of great gameplay innovations that many of our fans appreciated and loved, but it also had a setting that didn’t appeal to all of our fans.”
What’s interesting about all of this is that Call of Duty games now have a three year development cycle, meaning that Sledgehammer will have been hard at work on their second full COD game since long before Infinite Warfare’s announcement, let alone its release. Hirshberg notes that they “green-lit it over two years ago now, and they’ve been hard at work at it ever since.”
Whether or not Sledgehammer felt the need to pivot mid-development or if this step was planned all along with be interesting to try and prise out of whatever producers, developers and executives get put in front of journalists.
Alongside this, the majority of the year saw Activision riding high on the success of Black Ops III. Add-on revenues (microtransactions) surpassed season pass and map pack sales, despite record season pass sales.
Source: Activision via Videogamer, Seeking Alpha
gazzagb
Makes sense looking at the success of BF1 and it doesn’t take a genius to work out most people only bought IW for COD4.
I’d like to see WW2 revisited, or maybe Vietnam. We know that EA are releasing Battlefront so at least Activision have the advantage of not competing against another historic shooter.
JR.
The Lawrence of Arabia stuff in BF1 was brilliant. I’d love a whole game of that.
beeje13
There’s so much more that they can do with ww1, there was nothing about the Eastern Front or the early part of the war.
Tuffcub
So what are they saying? That two years ago that the new Infinite Warfare was going to be badly received? or COD 17 is having a huge a rather abrupt re-write with less than a year before release?
CR8ZYH0RSE
Just means someone is/knows a time traveler at Activision.Or clairvoyant, take your pick.
beeje13
People have been quite vocal with their dislike in the direction that cod is going for a few years now.
blast71
No extinction, no sale.
Nate
My biggest issue with COD are the increasingly more intrusive killstreaks. In the later games you couldn’t step outside for fear of being killed by some sort of giant space laser or drone. There is too much of a leaders advantage, which sucks any tension out of the match. Titanfall does it well, where your abilities charge regardless and you can pull back matches with a well timed coordination of your titans.
The Lone Steven
COD needs to take a 5 year break due to it being overproduced and at the point where it’s gained a reputation for being the same thing every year. It going back to it’s roots is a good sign but they sound like they haven’t learnt their lesson yet. COD needs a break. The MP is pretty much what 90% of people get COD for and i’m sure it is still strong enough to survive 5 years without another title. They also need to tone down the Micheal Bayness of the plots, stop the whole America vs Russia or spacerussia or russia plots and do everything they can to deliever a plot that isn’t Micheal Bay’s wetdream. Oh and rebalance the heck out of MP.