Activision has been taking an apologetic approach to its Call of Duty fans this year, admitting that Infinite Warfare didn’t resonate well. Now in an interview this week, Actvision's CEO, Eric Hirshberg has elaborated further, explaining that the company planned to get away from the futuristic theme eventually but admitted that Infinite Warfare was “one future game too many”.
Previously, Hirshberg stated that Infinite Warfare “wasn’t the success” that Activision had planned and that the game had drifted too far from Call of Duty’s roots. The futuristic theme for the series began with Black Ops II back in 2012, giving us one a year since. After 5 consecutive instalments, it’s easy to see why fans felt fatigue. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Hirshberg reminds people of the three-year-cycle that the series has, showing that both Infinite Warfare and WWII were in development long before each reveal.
“It was clearly one future game too many. If I could have had WWII a year earlier, knowing what I know now, then obviously the timing would have been better considering the community culture at the time. But we green light these games three years in advance. We were picking up enough in the feedback loop when green lighting this game, that it might be a good time to return to our roots.”
The Call of Duty: WWII reveal has already received a much warmer welcome than Infinite Warfare had and holds hope of pulling together the community as the Call of Duty player base is currently fragmented, split between different releases of games. “Our policy has been that as long as they're playing a Call of Duty game, we're happy. If people bought the new game but decided to go back to a previous one… if it's happening on a mass scale, then we want to provide new content for them,” Hirshberg explained.
Call of Duty: WWII releases on November 3rd 2017 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.
KitGuru Says: Call of Duty has been moving backwards as a franchise by constantly looking to the future. Hopefully the series can now start moving forward once again by returning to its roots and focussing on WWII. Will any of you be playing Call of Duty WWII later this year? Are you still playing any of the previous games?
It was fine I played to the end was fun. The problem is not the game it’s the all the newer gamer’s coming into play. For the most part they have never played the games based on old wars with the old outdated weapons old story lines. Gamer’s of my generation have because the old war games were done to death and got boring here is a hint we either won or lost. I find it very boring to have to go back in time and play with weapons my grand father had to use after playing the games based on either current or future tech. BF1 was not to bad because they tried to shake things up a bit but even still it felt so dated 95% of the time.
Show some guts and make a game that isn’t about WW1 WW2 or the Future… I think a Korean War game would be awesome!
Totally missing the point. It wasn’t the fact it was future based, its because its a rehash of the same gameplay they’ve been using since COD WAW. When they’re using 5+ year old death animations its essentially like playing the same game again, and it lessens the new “Oooo and Ahhhh” impact a fresh game has. So far the WW2 COD is starting to sound like a breath of fresh air for the COD franchise.
Hell the worst thing Battlefield had for it was direct competition with COD where they began mimicking much of the gameplay.
What a white-washing spastic. It’s the same bloody game for 10 years! A Decade! My God!
Shake up BF1? Bf1 is bare minimum of a game that looks beautiful/
Those stupid thrusters! The multiplayer is mostly a rip of Black Ops 3! The levels though I feel are better designed which doesn’t mean shit anyway considering most of the player base spends their time in the air.
The tactical moshpit gamemode is how the base game should have been. Thrusters have been removed, weapons are rebalanced and there’s something similar to a stamina system in place, where sliding and wallrunning take from your gauge and recharge slow so those mechanics can’t be spammed. It adds a new layer to the game with great opportunity to be capitalized upon.
Unfortunately, it’s just a single great playlist instead of the piece of shit that’s basically been out since November 6, 2015…
The game changing microtransactions do no favours either