Call of Duty ’14 to be “Next-Gen-First”

Call of Duty: Ghosts got quite a bit of negative attention when it was first released, for a number of different reasons. It’s a decent enough title, but it’s obvious – way obvious – that it was made with Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 with mind, and then ported to next-gen machines. The next game in the franchise, likely released in November this year, is being made with next-gen hardware in mind.

From IGN:

“Sledgehammer is approaching this as a next-gen-first development,” says Hirschberg. “Obviously in the console-transition year, anyone who developed a cross-generational game last year had to deal with the fact that the technology of the next-gen platforms was still coming into focus and changing quite a bit during the development process…. Now that we have the next-gen hardware out in the marketplace and solid, that is our primary development.”

“On the two-year cycle, with the level of content we were putting in the games, it became a real horse race each and every time to get everything done that we wanted to get done. With next-gen hardware, Hirshberg coninues, “we’ve got more capabilities than ever before to play with and we want to make sure our developers have the time to innovate, iterate, to bring the best creative vision and the most possible polish to each and every game.”

Fans of the franchise will buy it regardless. It’s a great multiplayer franchise, and one of the few that allows split-screen online. Despite all that, it’s nice to know that Activision are working towards bringing the quality of Call of Duty up, perhaps if only because of Titanfall and Destiny.