Call of Duty fans have voiced a lot of concern about the daring leap to the future that Activision is taking with the 2025 time setting for the next version of the series.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":458024,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"D"}']When Activision released the official reveal trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops II three weeks ago, it was a little like a religious event among first-person shooter fans. More than 20 million people viewed the trailer, and “likes” outnumbered “dislikes” by 2-to-1 on YouTube. But the crazy thing was that the game isn’t merely about assault rifles and snipers anymore. It’s about drones, robots, and guns that can shoot through cement.
Eric Hirshberg, chief executive of Activision Publishing, boasted that this could be the “most ambitious Call of Duty ever” because it has drastic changes to the game in terms of multiplayer, single-player setting, and zombie-shooting fests. The move to the near-future setting “could be as transformative as the move from World War II to the modern era.”
He said that sales of the game are “not just a great honor but also a massive responsibility.” Hirshberg said that the point behind Black Ops II is to bring meaningful innovation while staying true to the core of the franchise, which includes “epic realism, the ultimate adrenaline rush, easy to play but hard to master, and 60 frames per second.”
But Suarez agreed that the core of Call of Duty is the gritty infantry combat: gun against gun and soldier against soldier. The writers crafted a true human villain, Raul Menendez, a “monster” whose hatred was shaped in the Cold War and who orchestrates the hijacking of the American drone fleet.
“The main villain is not a robot,” Suarez said. “The main villain is not a drone. The main villain is a human.”
