Activision: This year's Call of Duty game is 'next-gen first'
The next entry in Activision's Call of Duty series is scheduled to launch for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 before it hits any other console, Activision Publishing's CEO Eric Hirshberg confirmed with IGN.
Sledgehammer Games was recently named as the developer behind this year's Call of Duty project. Activision announced during an earnings call last week that the franchise has switched to a three-year development cycle, with developers Sledgehammer, Infinity Ward, and Treyarch trading off on an annualized release schedule.
"Sledgehammer is approaching this as a next-gen-first development," Hirshberg told IGN. "Obviously in the console-transition year, anyone who developed a cross-generational game last year had to deal with the fact that the technology of the next-gen platforms was still coming into focus and changing quite a bit during the development process.... Now that we have the next-gen hardware out in the marketplace and solid, that is our primary development."
Sledgehammer Games previously assisted Infinity Ward in the creation of 2011's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, contributing to the project in a co-development role. This year's Call of Duty game is the first series entry that Sledgehammer will tackle as a primary developer.
[Image: Sledgehammer Games]
