We have here a rumour regarding Sledgehammer’s upcoming Call of Duty game that you should all take with a massive pinch of salt, but it’s worth taking note of. According to a tip sent to OnlySP back in December, which they have only now decided to talk about, Sledgehammer’s CoD title this year will be a fourth installment in the Modern Warfare series.

According to this tip, the game will take place in 2018, set after Modern Warfare 3, and will feature Captain Price and Nikolai as its two main characters, taking them back to the SAS. The game will be set across Europe and Asia, the SAS will have a major role in the game’s campaign, and Nikolai will probably also be a playable character.

However, what the tipster says next is where people will get a little (read: very) skeptical. According to the tip, Modern Warfare 4 will feature the Shadow Company as its main antagonists- the company led by General Shepherd in MW2. What’s the confusing part, though, is that Commander Shepherd, according to this tipster, is still alive. He gets stabbed through the eye at the end of MW2, but according to this tip, Shepherd has survived, and the main objective of the SAS in the game will not be to fight in another World War, but to hunt down General Shepherd.

According to the tip, there will also be stealth mission taking place in Amsterdam and Shanghai, but other than this, there are no other details on these missions to go on.

Again, while it seems likely that the game Sledgehammer are working on is Modern Warfare 4, it seems a little unlikely that the game’s story will play out like the tipster here says it will, so again, take this with a pinch of salt. Earlier it was confirmed that Sledgehammer games will be giving next gen consoles full priority.

Stay tuned, we’ll keep you updated.

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.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 is one of the biggest games of the year. There are absolutely no two ways about that.

If you are the type of a gamer who has keen eyes, you must have observed that majority of times, Call of Duty games are demonstrated on the Xbox 360. This obviously raises questions about the quality and the support for the PlayStation 3 version of the game.

In an interesting interview by CVG, Glen Schofield, general manager of Modern Warfare 3 co-developer Sledgehammer Games has reassured PlayStation 3 fans that Modern Warfare 3 is looking great and there is nothing to worry about.

He said, “We’ve been developing on PS3 for over a year. I do get tweeted saying ‘We haven’t seen any PS3 screens’. What happens is we start developing on 360 and at some point we switch. We switch to the PS3 and you make sure that that’s running at 60 frames a second, the graphics look freaking great, and we play both. They’re in parity. Every place is exactly the same. I’m not sure what the issues were with the last one, but there’s nothing to worry about with this one.”

The PS3 and PC versions of Call of Duty Black Ops suffered from serious perfomance issues causing the game to freeze. Gamers also reported drops in frame rate drop among other things. Let’s just hope that these kind of issues won’t hit the PlayStation 3 version of Modern Warfare 3.

For our entire coverage on Modern Warfare 3, please click here.

Sledgehammer Games was a studio Activision had set up especially to take the Call of Duty franchise in an all new direction. Sledgehammer had been working on a “third person action adventure game” for the CoD franchise, and they thought it was looking really good when they had the prototype done. But when they were offered the opportunity to work on Modern Warfare 3 with Infinity Ward, they just couldn’t pass it up.

“We came on board to make a third person action adventure game in the Call of Duty franchise and we were working on it for about six months,” Sledgehammer CEO Glen Schofield told GameSpot.

“We had about six to eight months on that and put a prototype together that was pretty compelling and it looked really good,” head of studio development Michael Condrey added. “[Then] we had the opportunity to work on the biggest thing in the industry with a developer in Infinity Ward that has demonstrated that they know how to do exceptional software. It was an opportunity we couldn’t miss.

“There are a lot of people on the team who have worked on Call of Duty before, on first-person shooters before, so there’s a lot of built-in knowledge about the first-person shooter genre and a lot of passionate gamers,” Condrey said. “There are guys on the floor who are on their tenth prestige in Black Ops. So it was a nice marriage of experience in the genre and sort of fan desire to work on this franchise.”

Modern Warfare 3 releases on November 8 for the Xbx 360, PS3, PC, DS and Wii. N+ will be handling the DS version, and Treyarch the Wii version.

Activision released a debut multiplayer trailer for MW3 recently. Have a look at it here.

G4 has a feature showing off some awesome gameplay of Modern Warfare 3, including survival mode.  Creative Strategist at Infinity Ward Robert Bowling explains a whole bunch of features within the game, so check it out.  The game comes out November 8th, 2011 for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC and the Wii.  The Call of Duty XP Event is coming up September 2nd and you can expect some exclusive coverage right here on GamingBolt.com