Barely a day after Activision Blizzard posted some fairly obvious hints about its next "Call of Duty" game, the game industry juggernaut has officially revealed "Call of Duty: Ghost," the next installment in its wildly popular, billion-dollar-strong military shooter franchise.
A live-action trailer showing warriors of all shapes, sizes, and historical epochs wearing militaristic mask and face paint accompanied the game's unveiling. The film ends with an iconic "Call of Duty"-esque marine pulling a skull-emblazoned mask over his face as the gravelly-voiced narrator intones: "There are those who wear masks to protect us all." I'm guessing that means the next "Call of Duty" is going to have players fight a lot of terrorists and Bond-like supervillains.
Sticking to its annual tradition of leap-frogging between two different studios (Infinity Ward and Treyarch, both of which exclusively work on "Call of Duty" games for Activision), "Ghost" will be released Nov. 5 for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. It follows last year's "Call of Duty: Black Ops 2," which was Treyarch's most recent installment.
Infinity Ward, the studio that first created the game industry's most commercially successful franchise in 2003 with the original "Call of Duty," finished off the "Modern Warfare" storyline in 2011 with "Modern Warfare 3." While Mark Rubin, an executive producer at the company, said in a statement that he felt "everyone was expecting us to make 'Modern Warfare 4,'" the fact that the "Modern Warfare" saga's main villain had finally been vanquished in 2011's game left Infinity Ward searching for a new way to continue churning out its bi-annual "Call of Duty" products while Treyarch continued work on its "Black Ops" series.
“We saw the console transition as the perfect opportunity to start a new chapter for 'Call of Duty,'" Rubin said. "So we're building a new sub-brand, a new engine, and a lot of new ideas and experiences for our players. We can't wait to share them with our community."
"Ghost" will also be Activision's first "Call of Duty" game to appear on "next-generation platforms," the company said. It didn't give much information about when or how it would appear on these new consoles, presumably because Microsoft still hasn't officially announced its next-generation Xbox. Activision did tell "Call of Duty fans" at the end of the game's teaser trailer that they could "see [Ghost] live at the new generation Xbox reveal," however — an event that Microsoft recently announced will take place May 21 at the Xbox campus in Redmond, Wash.
Curiously enough, Activision did not announce any plans to make "Call of Duty: Ghost" available on Nintendo's Wii U console. "Black Ops 2" was the first "Call of Duty" game to appear on Nintendo's latest home entertainment device, though critics and gamers alike met the modified version of the game with skepticism at best.
Watch the first "Call of Duty: Ghost" teaser trailer below: