Activision says that its upcoming Call of Duty title, which is due out in 2014- which Sledgehammer was recently revealed to be developing entirely on its own- will be a game that will focus largely on PS4 and Xbox One, rather than the current gen ones, as opposed to what Ghosts did.
“Sledgehammer is approaching this as a next-gen-first development,” said Activision Publishing’s CEO, Eric Hirshberg. “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.”
“On the two-year cycle, with the level of content we were putting in the games, it became a real horse race each and every time to get everything done that we wanted to get done,” Hirshberg continued. “With next-gen hardware, we’ve got more capabilities than ever before to play with and we want to make sure our developers have the time to innovate, iterate, to bring the best creative vision and the most possible polish to each and every game.”
However, that does not mean people who only own current-gen systems (Xbox 360, PS3) won’t get to play the game. “There are still a lot of people playing on current gen,” Hirshberg said. “We want to deliver a great experience for them as well. But it will be a next-gen-first production and the current-gen game will be a version of that.”
Stay tuned for continued coverage.