Call of Duty moves to 3 year development cycle

[Gahars]

Call of Duty, like it, hate it, or believe it to be everything wrong with gaming, is a juggernaut of a franchise. Activision has maintained the franchise's annual releases, and Scrooge McDuckian pool of money, for the past few years by alternating between two studios, Infinity Ward and Treyarch.

This is a new generation, however, and new generations call for bold, new strategies, like... addition.

In a significant change of strategy, Activision has added a third studio, Sledgehammer Games, to the rotation giving each studio three years to developer their respective Call of Duty titles, announced Activision Publishing president and CEO Eric Hirshberg.

Sledgehammer will lead development on this year's new Call of Duty title, expected to release in late 2014. This comes as part of an effort to improve quality, said Hirshberg during an earnings results call on Thursday.

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...Sledgehammer has previously worked on the Call of Duty franchise in a collaborative capacity with Infinity Ward on 2012's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Sledgehammer was focused on the creation of post-launch DLC for the game, along with Raven Software.

CVG

Well, after the icy reception Ghosts received, I can't exactly blame them for the stall of "Duty." It is bit of a shame, though. Those looking forward to the next Treyarch installment will have to wait until at least 2015.

Is this move a reflection of the increased difficulty that formerly-next, now-current generation development begins? Is there a genuine desire to ensure polish and quality (along with DLC, of course) here? Both? Neither? Why am I asking so many rhetorical questions when the average GBAtemp user doesn't care one way or the other?

Hopefully we'll have some sort of answer by the end of 2014, when Call of Duty receives the Gallagher treatment.

 

[gamefan5]

Actually that's the best news I heard all day. Now COD hopefully will truly feel like a breath of fresh air for future releases, I hope.

 

[FireGrey]

Can't they atleast have a year gap to improve the engine?

 

[zeello]

as the writer pointed out, this may be more a result of higher development costs of next ten than it is an effort to improve quality, depth, or originality of the titles themselves. in which case this is grim news.

on the other hand its nice that cod is stepping up to the plate. if cod began to fail it might have been the last peg needed to cause a gaming crash.

 

[Maxternal]

Can't they atleast have a year gap to improve the engine?

Sure, just during that year there will ALSO be another studio working on another game

 

[Red_Savarin]

Every year you pay for the same game with different maps, i'am owner of MW3 and BO2 and didn't give a damn the new one...
People got bored of always same type of play, and in the ghost one what do you get different, here have a dog! And wait there is more! You can be a chick too and instead of zombies you get aliens...

I think this is good to the franshise, it did get saturated in this last years, so people didn't buy ghost pretty much because of the same repetition every year.

 

[DinohScene]

Maybe this will improve the game.
I honestly don't think so but hey, can't hurt to hope a little?

 

[T3GZdev]

Does this mean more time to make wii u DLC?
& leave ps3/360 in the past?

 

[Langin]

When I read the title I was like 'YES FINALLY NO MORE YEARLY COD RELEASE!!!'

Now I am like 'no shit has changed'.

One of the most overhyped franchises I guess, together with a few others.

 

[Hadrian]

Well they did actually try to do this before, Sledgehammer was working on a 3rd person CoD game but it was cancelled as Activision thought people wanted another Modern Warfare instead. Of course Sledgehammer did work with IW on the campaign for MW3.

Chances are this is the introduction of a new engine, they've been heavily recruiting new staff with the emphasis of working on a new next gen engine.

Another thing is that I am pleased that there is an added developer, I really like what Treyarch do, I enjoyed Black Ops 2 a fair bit as it actually had a good story and the new additions to gameplay worked however it was clear that they needed another year to make it better...hopefully Treyarch will finally get that chance. Infinity Ward however...their CoD games tend to be worse and Ghosts was definitely a step behind after Black Ops 2, so damn mediocre it hurt.

So far it sounds like the 360/PS3 are being skipped for this years release though I'm sure Activision will get Treyarch to do a quick port (like with the Wii/Wii U ports though I don't expect any Wii U this year) , Activision love the cash.

 

[RchUncleSkeleton]

3 year cycle don't mean a damn thing when you have 3 studios working to push out yearly versions. Call of Duty is the most oversaturated franchise in gaming today. It's all the lame brains of the world who keep activision with a hefty profit margin by buying these rehashed excuses for new games year after year. I'm pretty sure intelligence and logic are both in decline as all you see these days are sheep following the masses.

 

[WhiteMaze]

We'll see.

But the probability of COD's quality improving, at the cost of no new game every year (much MUCH money down the drain), is slim at best.

I have my doubts.

In other words, they had opportunities to improve their game, instead of re-lauching the same crap over and over again.

But it sells. Crap or not, the name alone sells. No need to improve that much. (to their eyes)

 

[Sterling]

What Call of Duty and Battlefield both need is more optimized netcode. They're running off of incredibly old and heavily modified engine code, and that is what causes all the grief in Call of Duty and in Battlefield. After all, you can never really tell if you were simply outplayed, or if the opponent simply had a better connection/lag compensation. This 3 year development cycle isn't going to make things better as long as the old styled code is iterized.

 

[Crass]

I am surprised they aren't keeping the 1 year development cycle and just change the name of the series. Like how Bravely Default is essentially a Final Fantasy game, but they want to disassociate that franchise with their newer titles because of all the baggage.

 

[Reploid]

They can go 30 years, every new game will still be lame.

 

[Essometer]

Same shit, different year.

 

[PolloDiablo]

and the amount of fucks I give is.... 0

 

[BlackWizzard17]

I just play cod for zombies I loves it.
ZOMBIES IS EVERY THING
ZOMBIES IS LIFE

 

[AngryGeek416]

FPS games need to go extinct .

 

[natkoden]

2014 - Treyarch
2015 - Sledge
2016 - IW

In the past:


2011 - IW
2012 - Treyarch
2013 - IW
Rinse and repeat

Changes? Yes, we will have another shitty version of the game developed by another shitty studio!