Ben-DutkaIt's just one of those questions that suddenly hits you. And your answer usually is something like, "oh yeah…how's that gonna actually happen?"
As we all know, Call of Duty has been using the same engine for almost six years now. The competition – namely, DICE and EA – used that lagging to their advantage by continually promoting the fancy Frostbite 2 engine for Battlefield 3 .
Now, granted, I think Infinity Ward and Treyarch have managed to get a tremendous amount of mileage out of that engine; it isn't like they never upgraded or refined it. IW really managed to make a great game with Modern Warfare 3 and most critics and gamers would agree with that. However, even the most ardent CoD fans would love to see a new engine for their beloved franchise. It could really make the series shine as bright – if not brighter – than Battlefield . But wait…don't we have a vicious circle here? A Catch .22 of sorts?
It takes time to develop a new engine. Activision would never want CoD to miss a year; the publisher wants its annual billion-dollar payday. So, if they request a new title every twelve months, how will we ever get a new engine? Will it finally get so old that even Activision is forced to take a year off? Or maybe they'll just assign development of that new engine to the "other" CoD team. In other words, maybe they'll tell Infinity Ward to create that new engine while Treyarch works on the next CoD.
Essentially, each developer has two years to make a CoD, not one. So maybe that's the way it's going to happen. But for some reason, I get this sneaking suspicion that we're going to have to wait even longer…perhaps even until the next console generation. I mean, it's not like they're losing sales because of an old engine. So if they keep breaking records, why bother, right?
Related Game(s): Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3