Modern Warfare 3 – New Horizon or Setting Sun?

Mar 7, 2011

When the heads of Infinity Ward were fired last March and most of their top talent quit soon after, publisher Activision said, it didn’t expect the turmoil to affect operations. Really?

Infinity Ward’s operations have certainly been affected enough that it has called in reinforcements to make the next game in the Call of Duty franchise. The decision to seek outside help is a departure for Activision, which in the past has left Infinity Ward alone to develop the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games. While this isn’t the first time a studio has collaborated on a COD game, it is the first time IW has not been the sole developer since COD 4 swept the world and put the franchise front and center of the FPS genre. The sales were staggering for Callof Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Callof duty: Modern Warfare 2 selling 13 million and 20 million units, respectively. When a franchise has that kind of financial horse power its owner is going to put some serious thought into who they let take it out for a drive.

Activision has enlisted Sledgehammer Games, a Northern California studio, to help out with the making of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The title is well into production and is expected to come out in November, the same month that the publisher has annually released a new Call of Duty installment. Modern Warfare 3 will be the first game Infinity Ward has produced since the departure of company co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella.

Sledgehammer, which is led by a team recruited away from Activision’s rival Electronic Arts Inc, is working hand in hand with IW and since no news has surfaced about conflict, I’ll take that as a good sign of how the teams are working in tandem. The two studios are equally sharing duties of producing the single-player portion of the game, and it will be interesting to see if the cinematic story telling that has set the series apart, will be impacted.

Activision has also brought in Wisconsin-based Raven Software, which is working on the online multi-player elements. Raven Software titles include Singularity, Wolfenstein, Quake 4 and both Soldier of Fortune titles among others. Since this is the most critical piece of the franchise, the fact that IW is not involved at all has me nervous. It has also been confirmed that the game engine will remain the same as MW2. So the core dynamic and style will be familiar, but one can only guess at level design and layout. It will also be intersting to see how quickly Raven Software will addresses fixes, as IW was notoriously slow in that regard.

But pulling in the Sledgehammer team to help out on Modern Warfare 3 is creating a domino effect by forcing Activision to delay the start of production on a new Call of Duty spin-off game that the studio had begun working on before the upheaval at Infinity Ward. Nothing is known about the title, but there is speculation it may be an Action/RPG similar to the Fallout series. Reagrdless, whatever they were doing is now delayed as a result.

This isn’t just war games here people. Producing Call of Duty games on an annual schedule is critical to Activision’s bottom line. It’s one of two franchises upon which they are dependent for most of their revenue (World of Warcraft being the second). So missing a release date or rushing out a game before it’s ready could have massive impact on both the studios involved and Activision as the parent company.

As a side note, Call of Duty: Black Ops, produced by Activision studio Treyarch in 2010, was the best-selling video game in the U.S. last year, as was Modern Warfare 2 in 2009, so saying that there are high hopes is an understatement.

Will it be a bang or a bust? We will have to wait it out and see, but we can all hope that Captain John Paul Jones statement has proved inspirational for them and they “…have not yet begun to fight.”