Call of Duty publisher Activision has confirmed that we can expect to see the 2019 edition of the popular FPS franchise revealed before the current fiscal quarter ends, meaning it’ll be shown off by June 30 at the absolute latest.
Speaking during its latest earnings call, the publisher described the latest Call of Duty – developed by Modern Warfare studio Infinity Ward – as “game changing.” We still don’t know what shape the new game will take, but rumours of a Modern Warfare 4 have been swirling for a few months now.
Activision Blizzard President & COO Coddy Johnson said:
We also recognize that we need to do even more to maintain the breadth of the Call of Duty player base beyond the launch quarters, and the Call of Duty team is hard at work on that for this fall’s big content release, excitement for which is incredibly high around the organization. We expect that both the launch and post launch content will bring game changing experiences to our fans.
Just last month, it appeared that Call of Duty 2019 – whatever it is – is already playable, as a number of a number of American athletes took to social media to reveal that they’d been to some kind of event to play the latest game.
This suggests that a playable build of the new COD will be present at E3 2019, which kicks off in mid June. However, I’d imagine a full reveal event will take place before that, as Activision traditionally likes to reveal its new games at its own events, which often take place around May.
As for what exactly the next Call of Duty will be, Kotaku’s Jason Schrier recently took to ResetEra to rule out the possibility of a Ghosts 2, while 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 sour reception to Infinity Ward’s sci-fi tinged FPS 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 the franchise 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.