Microsoft confirmed that Call of Duty is coming this year as early as October.
As reported by Inverse, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer told employees in an internal Xbox meeting that they were planning to release the game this October 2024.
The game is rumored to be Call of Duty: Black Ops Gulf War. Now, it’s important to point out here that Activision and Microsoft have yet to officially reveal the game, its title or other details.
To put that in context, Activision revealed Call of Duty Modern Warfare III with its official trailer on August 2023, before its November release. On the other hand, they revealed they would be releasing a Modern Warfare game in February 2022, confirmed the title Call of Duty Modern Warfare II in April, and then shared the trailer in June, before its October release.
How Activision revealed Call of Duty Modern Warfare III may be an outlier, as the company had to work around the uncertainty if they were going to close their deal with Microsoft that year or not. 2022 might be a better indication of how Activision, now under Microsoft, will reveal their next game. They will be slowly dropping details to keep fans sustained right until a big reveal in the middle of the year.
Rumors about Call of Duty: Black Ops Gulf War also indicates that the title has been in production for four years. While we are used to games taking as long as five years of game development, it isn’t impossible that this title could have been done in only four years.
That’s because every Call of Duty has been the work of an army of several studios, with hundreds of game developers splitting up tasks on every title, for years now. It may sometimes be hard to appreciate how much manpower goes, not only into making sure Call of Duty releases annually, but ensuring that each release has incredibly high production values.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Gulf is also rumored to break with the franchise’s mission based structure and place the game in an open world. It will be interesting to see how that plays out, given the theme of espionage in the background of an ongoing military conflict.
In the meantime, Activision is also reportedly scrambling to assign a head studio to the Call of Duty title scheduled for 2025. This is a dilemma they were not able to resolve before the Microsoft deal closed, so this may be a situation where their new leadership will have to step in.
