Activision Admits They Made One Future Game Too Many

By most accounts, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare wasn't actually that bad. The reviews say the single-player campaign was a bit standard but it had good characters and dialogue, the zombie mode was as fun and goofy as ever, and the multiplayer was... the multiplayer, that's never ever going to change. But if you asked the actual fans of the series (or people just looking to hate on things), it was absolutely the worst thing to happen to the franchise. The announcement trailer was the lowest-rated youtube video of all time for a period, and gamers were loudly expressing their dissatisfaction with the direction of the Call of Duty games.

Well, the game was released despite their protests. But this might surprise you to hear: Activation actually listened. And no, I'm not just saying that because their next game took the series back to it's ww2 roots: to quote Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg in an interview with Game Informer, apparently even their team was getting a bit of sci-fi fatigue:

...there was a time not too long ago when everybody in the Call of Duty community was fatigued with modern and was asking for innovation and asking for new experiences, and thats what led us to start experimenting with taking the franchise into the future in the first place. I think with the benefit of hindsight we can all agree we might have had one more future game than we needed [laughs]. Not to make any comment on the quality of the game from last year, but I think that while there were a lot of innovations and a lot of fun new things that players got to do, it was one future game too many.

...Two-and-a-half years before that, we started both feeling ourselves as players, and also starting to maybe hear that desire for a return to our roots. And again, when these games take three years to make, its a bit of a fools errand to try to perfectly time the changing tides of opinion with the slate.

So there you have it: game developers are people too. Needless to say, while it's unfortunate for them that they would make this call so soon after Battlefield 1 beat them to the punch, most fans are just excited to return to the beaches of D-Day, and the unambiguous fight between freedom-loving Americans vs the goose-stepping Nazis. And I never believe I'd ever write that, ten years ago.

Anyway. The full interview is worth a read. Check it out, if you have the time. Meantime, we can expect Call of Duty: WW2 to hit the shelves on November 3, 2017.