Activision has announced Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and it kicked everything off with a 3-minute reveal trailer featuring Kevin Spacey. As the title suggests, this Call of Duty is all about drones, high-tech helicopters, and other autonomous war-ready vehicles.
The first-person shooter will be released on November 4 of this year, which is in-line with previous Call of Duty release dates.
Advanced Warfare seems to have been announced early as a result of leaks, since the trailer and announcement were both published just hours after information regarding the game made its way online. Originally, Activision planned to make the announcement on May 4.
The vast majority of Call of Duty games have fallen into sub-franchises. Until Ghosts was released last year, the Black Ops and Modern Warfare franchises had been built up each year. However, since Advanced Warfare doesn’t fall into either, there are now four sub-franchises being developed.
Ghosts was far from popular when it was released in 2013, so this year, Sledgehammer needs to step things up in order to cover-up Infinity Ward’s mistakes. The Call of Duty franchise is one of the profitable to have ever been created and now that development is occurring primarily with the Xbox One and PS4 in mind, Advanced Warfare should look better than any previous title.
Very little gameplay was shown in the trailer–it mainly featured a digital Kevin Spacey talking about America and democracy–but some potential additions were hinted at in the video. For example, hoverbikes and exoskeletons were both present in the trailer, suggesting that they will be available in the single and multiplayer versions of the game.
Earlier this year it was announced that Call of Duty would be moving to a three-year development cycle and away from the Infinity Ward/Treyarch duo. This means that Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer will be taking turns each year with a new CoD release.