Call of Duty: World at War Debuts on Steam

Eight days after it’s NA retail release, the World War II based shooter from Treyarch has made its debut on Valve’s Steam. Call of Duty: World at War can now be purchased from Steam for $49.95 Read more

Call of Duty 7 Maybe WWII Based

In an interview with CVG, Treyarch hinted that CoD7 may go back to WWII. Here’s an excerpt;

I can’t say that there won’t ever be a WWII Call of Duty game again, but we’re glad we were able to end the war and we’re glad we’re going to support the title with lots of downloadable content

Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising E3 Fact Sheet

Press Release:

Taking gamers as close to war as they’ll ever want to get, Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising is the much anticipated return of the genre-defining military conflict simulator. Set to deliver the total combat experience, Operation Flashpoint 2 will challenge players to survive the chaos and rapidly evolving situations of modern warfare in a new contemporary theatre.

Players will experience the intensity, diversity and claustrophobia of a modern conflict from the unique perspectives of an infantry marine, a helicopter pilot, a Special Forces officer or a tank commander, each engaged against the full force of the Chinese PLA on a scale never previously experienced in a military action title. Gameplay simulates an immense conflict between advanced forces and provides unparalleled scope with different military disciplines, vehicles and equipment for players to utilize. Read more

Infinity Ward Reclaims Call of Duty

According to an ex-activision employee that spoke to Next-Gen, Infinity Ward will be the sole developer of Call of Duty franchise after Call of Duty 5 is released. Call of Duty 5 is being developed by Tyranch Studios, the same people that developed 2006’s console-only Call of Duty 3.

Prior to the multi-million-selling CoD4: Modern Warfare, Infinity Ward developed the original CoD for PC in 2003, along with CoD2 in 2005. In an effort to capitalize on the immense popularity of the series on an annual basis, Activision gave internal studio Treyarch the responsibility to develop CoD3, which launched in 2006.

That strategy would’ve had the franchise alternating between studios every year, at the same time filling Activision’s coffers on an annual basis.

Treyarch will still be the developer behind the upcoming CoD5.

Postmortem: Infinity Ward

The latest issue of Game Developer magazine features a cover story on the making of Call of Duty 4. Infinity Ward discusses why they switched to a modern setting as well as the bombing failure of the PC demo. Here’s a snip provided by Gamasutra:

“Call of Duty 4 was Infinity Ward’s third Call of Duty game, and as such we approached it knowing we needed to do something fresh. We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves any more than we have to, and many members of the team came off Call of Duty 2 promising never to work on another WWII game.

We tried several different directions, many of which were failures, but the ultimate result was the best game any of us have ever worked on. As a game development experience, it seemed to go so smoothly that it was difficult to come up with five things that went wrong…

Coming off Call of Duty 2, we knew we wanted to do something different for our next game. We don’t agree with some critics who say that WWII as a genre is dead, but we couldn’t muster the same passion for the subject that we had in our first three WWII games (Call of Duty 1 and 2 and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault).

We had a few ideas that we wanted to do and eventually settled on two. One was Modern Warfare, and the other was a new project.”

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