Black Ops Is Here: So What's Next?

It’s not exactly breaking news that Call of Duty: Black Ops is already a mega-hit. Or that publisher Activision considers the CoD franchise the crowning jewel in its empire. So while CoD founding studio Infinity Ward is still recouping from all of that drama a while back where the company’s two founders were ousted by Activision (Black Ops comes from Treyarch, the studio behind all of the odd-numbered series entries), you can bet your butt that future iterations of the series are already well under way.

But the obvious question becomes: where does Call of Duty go from here? The series has bounced between the World Wars of the early 20th Century, to the covert operations of Modern Warfare, and now back to the heights of the cold war in the 70s. Black Ops developer Treyarch has made it clear that they’re committed to CoD for the long haul, and plan to make lots more games for the series. Infinity Ward is likewise still onboard, even without the brain trust of the duo that invented the franchise. And then there’s newcomer Sledgehammer Games, which was just recently outed as working on a CoD game by a loose-lipped Activision executive.

Gamasutra cites “industry sources” that have them convinced that the next Call of Duty is going to jump timeframes again — and this time to somewhere no CoD has gone before. Sledgehammer’s game — which expected to be the next entry at bat — is said to be set in the future, and feature, “for lack of a better term, space Marines.”

As enticing as this concept sounds — and I’m totally on the bandwagon if they go that way, I think it’s a great idea to keep the franchise fresh — I can’t help wondering what it might be like to play a Call of Duty game that goes further in the other direction. Can you imagine a Civil War-era CoD? A Revolutionary War CoD?

What do you think of the prospect of Call of Duty: Future Warfare? Are you ready for this ultra-realistic (yet highly cinematic) series to take the leap into science fiction?

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