Sledgehammer Games, the studio that revived flagging interest in Call of Duty with its excellent debut effort, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, recently held an informal and friendly interview in which he decided to field questions from fans.
One of the most popular queries that he was repeatedly pushed to answer was whether Sledgehammer was working on any sort of Call of Duty remaster- maybe bringing the Modern Warfare or Black Ops Call of Duty games to the PS4 and Xbox One? However, Sledgehammer’s studio head Michael Condrey confirmed that there was no such project in the works.
“There are tons of games that I’ve played in my career that I would love to play again, remastered and next-generation experience right, from God of War to Ratchet & Clank, so I get the appeal and I, you know, my heart is closest to Call of Duty and I love going back and playing CoD 4 and Modern [Warfare] 2, and so I can tell you we’re not working on any remastered edition at Sledgehammer,” he said, before diplomatically adding, “I think there’s opportunity for Call of Duty, but that said I don’t know if anybody is working on it, we’re not working on it.”
So that closes the door on Sledgehammer working on a remaster, but it does leave the possibility open for another studio working on one.
And what about future Call of Duty games? Well, Condrey had some very interesting thoughts to share about those as well:
“We’re coming out of Advanced Warfare very proud of what that game is and what it means to fans, but we’re also listening closely to what fans want and ideas about how to continue that going forward, so yeah, everything is on the table,” he said. “The team is focused on the DLC, but we’ve talked about new ways to play, whether that’s branching story-lines or third [person] mode or crazy changes to the multiplayer, we have the luxury of already being in pre-production of our next game so all ideas are good ideas at this point.”
Branching story lines is nothing new for the Call of Duty games, of course- Treyarch already attempted this with the fan favorite Call of Duty: Black Ops II back in 2012. That said, Condrey added one more intriguing tease about future Call of Duty games:
“After speaking with military advisors, strong female characters, strong female military presences are gonna be in the future, and we’re seeing it today, so absolutely, you would expect to see that one day in Call of Duty,” he said.
Personally, that would be freaking awesome, and it might work towards expanding the already considerable audience base of the Call of Duty series.