While we still aren’t entirely sure what Call of Duty 2019 is going to be, it seems a select few have already played the latest instalment of Activision’s enduring FPS franchise, as a number of American athletes have shared on social media that they’ve been lucky enough to play this year’s model.
Riley Ridley, Tajae Sharpe, and N’Keal Harry all shared pictures of themselves at what looks to be some kind of official Call of Duty event (via All Games Delta).
Whether this is some kind of prank from the American footballers or an actual marketing ploy from Activision remains to be seen, but I’d imagine it’s the latter.
Call of Duty games tend to get officially revealed around May, so it makes sense that Activision would be ramping up its marketing efforts for the game now. The 2019 release is being developed by Infinity Ward, who are best known for the Modern Warfare entries into the franchise.
They also worked on the divisive (but actually pretty good) Infinite Warfare. It remains to be seen if the new entry will be something entirely new, or a sequel to Infinite Warfare, Modern Warfare, or Ghosts.
Kotaku’s Jason Schrier did recently take to Resetera to rule out the possibility of a Ghosts 2 however, and Schrier is a man who tends to know what he’s talking about.
Meanwhile, Robert Bowling, a former Creative Strategist at Infinity Ward, recently took to Twitter to claim we’ll never see Infinite Warfare 2. It’s unclear how in the know Bowling would be given he now works at EA, but the reception to Infinity Ward’s sci-fi themed shooter suggests Activision wouldn’t be keen to put out a sequel anytime soon.
Other rumours have suggested that COD 2019 will be ditching the battle royale mode introduced in last year’s Black Ops 4 to focus on a single-player campaign and more traditional multiplayer modes. As with everything else regarding COD right now, we’ll have to take it with a pinch of salt and wait for the official reveal to drop.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.