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The Call Of Duty series is to be taken back to “its roots”, the game’s publisher Activision has said.
In a conference call with investors on Thursday, chief executive Eric Hirshberg and chief operating officer Thomas Tippl said the 2017 instalment in the hugely successful series would return to “traditional combat” – a message many have taken as meaning the contemporary or historical settings of some of the series’ earlier and very popular games.
In recent years, Call Of Duty has gone increasingly future-based – most notably with 2014′s Advanced Warfare, set in 2054, and last year’s Infinite Warfare, which was set in the distant future and involved inter-planetary combat and near-science-fiction weapons.
Both titles were met with mixed reactions by fans and such a response appears to have struck a chord among the game’s developers.
It’s also a far cry from the game’s origins in 2003, when it launched as a Second World war drama and dropped players into some of the conflict’s landmark battles, including the Normandy landings and the Battle of Stalingrad.
The following two games in the series were also set during the Second World War, emphasising the idea that the game’s “roots” do lie in 20th-century conflict.
The success of EA’s Battlefield 1, which also launched last year and is set during the First World War, may also have had an effect on Activision’s thinking – Battlefield is estimated to have sold around 15 million copies.
More details on the next game are likely to start appearing as we head into the summer and E3, the gaming industry’s big reveal event in Los Angeles in June, where Call Of Duty games of previous years have been unveiled.
