This year's Call of Duty game will be revealed on 4th May, according to a page tantalisingly subtitled "a new era arrives" over on the official site. The associated image (tucked away in the page's source code, and uncovered by NeoGAF) includes what looks like a shot of the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco. Further inspection of the code reveals links to websites about private military companies. One link points to a Business Insider report on Blackwater, a PMC that has been mired in legal controversy following the shooting of 37 Iraqi civilians in 2007. The article describes how Blackwater - now known as Academi - has sought to rebuild its reputation in the past few years. There's also a link to a series of New York Times articles on the subject. You can probably make your own deductions about the new game's premise and plot. This year's Call of Duty is being developed by Sledgehammer Games, co-developer of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Key staff include Dead Space creators Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey. Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg praised the studio in an earnings call from February, describing it as "the perfect choice to support our new approach and bring fresh ideas and creativity to this great franchise and to raise the bar for next-gen games overall". The franchise will now be rotated between three studios - Sledgehammer, Infinity Ward and Treyarch - which means that each annual title will have three years in development. This is widely considered to be a tacit acknowledgement that the previous, two-studio development cycle has led to a quality drop in recent years. "Looking forward to 2014, as both Bobby and I said, we think we have a superlative game in the works and that we have some new approaches this year that we think are going to be very positive, with the three-year development cycle [and] with the injection as a lucrative leadership from some very intelligent folks at Sledgehammer games," Hirshberg said at the conclusion of the call. US trade magazine GameInformer has obtained an image of the new game - the file name is "Blacksmith". Check out that hat. What do you think? Source - OXM
