Activision Announces Future Plans for Call of Duty, Confirms Termination of Studio Heads

Activision has finally responded to all the goings-on at Infinity Ward, as well as dropped some bombs on the gaming community. In the announcement, it was confirmed that Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella were fired, but no more detail is given. Infinity Ward will be temporarily led by Activision's publishing CTO, Steve Pearce, and head of production, Steve Ackrich. Despite the chaos, the studio will still be putting out the two planned downloadable map packs for Modern Warfare 2, which are set to release before the end of the year.

But, Kotick thought he'd take things a step further, and clued the rest of us in on the direction the franchise will be taking in the coming years. First, confirming what was already widely predicted, Activision announced that a new Call of Duty would be coming out of developer Treyarch sometime this year. What we didn't see coming, though, was the announcement of another Call of Duty game being developed by Sledgehammer Games "in the action-adventure genre" currently set to release in 2011. On top of all this, there were some references to "expanding" the Call of Duty franchise in a way similar to Blizzard's expansion of their IPs. This fits in nicely with the idea that Activision is planning to release some kind of subscription-based Call of Duty game in the future.

I'm curious about the game coming out of Sledgehammer, though. I'll admit, I've enjoyed the past Call of Duty games well enough, but seeing the series take a gameplay shift while holding true to certain story-based (completely insane in a summer blockbuster kind of way) ideals could be really interesting. My vote for Treyarch's next entry? Cats at War.

Image found on the TeamXbox forums, credit to deilgyre.