This Year’s Call Of Duty Release Marks A Major Change For Activision
2023's Call of Duty release will be an extension of Modern Warfare 2.
It would seem that Activision‘s original plans to skip 2023 as its release year for Call of Duty have been abandoned. In fact, the franchise’s installment this year will be a continuation of 2022’s record-breaking Modern Warfare 2, which is actually a surprising twist for the world’s best-known first-person shooter (FPS) franchise that released a completely new gaming installment every fall, for more than two decades now.
According to VGC, Activision’s goal for the new installment in the Call of Duty franchise is to make the game feel like a standalone, full-priced gaming release but also an extension of the recently released Modern Warfare 2. The current plans for the new game include carrying over all the maps and modes present in the most recent release, but those close to the project also cautioned that those plans might change again during ongoing development. Activision is currently planning to release the new game in fall 2023—as it has traditionally done so since forever.
Activision previously made several changes to the Call of Duty release schedule since 2021, when Call of Duty Vanguard, which we honestly believed won’t be centered around WWII, failed to meet the company’s expectations. It was previously reported that 2023 would be the first year in decades to go by without a mainline Call of Duty title due to diminishing quality resulting from frequent releases. Instead, it was reported that Activision would push the 2023 release to 2024 and release an expansion for Modern Warfare 2 to fill in the gap made by the lacking installment.
However, it would seem that Activision had a change of heart—likely due to the massive success of Modern Warfare 2—and that the purported expansion is actually restructured into a fully-developed, standalone release. Apparently, the expansion Activision had planned was too big for a DLC or an expansion release—as was the case with the upcoming sequel in the Zelda series—so Activision morphed it into a full gaming release.
That release is supposed to continue the narrative and gameplay established in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 by offering everything that makes the current game great and building its own narrative and gameplay on top of it. Employees of Sledgehammer Games—Activision actually has several studios working on Call of Duty titles—are expressing their concerns regarding a tight development and release window. Something similar happened during the development of Vanguard, and the developer’s dissatisfaction with crunch time was best reflected in gamers’ dissatisfaction with the game.
But things have changed drastically for Activision Blizzard since the release of Call of Duty Vanguard in 2021. Activision Blizzard nearly drowned in the sea of controversies ranging from your typical workforce exploitation—including mandatory overtime that was poorly paid, if paid at all—to gender discrimination and sexual misconduct. These allegations, the majority of which were based on truth, led to massive cultural shifts within Activision Blizzard, so Sledgehammer Games could expect helping hands from their colleagues from Infinity Ward and Treyarch.
