It appears that Treyarch will be taking over development duties for the 2020 Call of Duty game, the first shift from Activision’s three-year rotation between Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Games, and the aforementioned Treyarch, since beginning a three company rotation in 2012.
The reported move comes from Kotaku, who cites inside sources at the companies, informing the gaming publication that Treyarch will work on a new Black Ops title to follow-up to last year’s Black Ops IIII, to be set in the Cold War.
Sledgehammer Games and Raven are to support in development for the 2020 title, as Treyarch takes the lead on the project. Raven was originally going to be the lead studio while Sledgehammer Games supported them, and Treyarch worked on Black Ops IIIII (it’s getting a bit ridiculous that we’re not using actual Roman numerals for this game) for 2021.
Both titles are said to take place during the Cold War, so Sledgehammer and Raven are going to be supporting Treyarch by adapting some of their own content to Treyarch’s vision for the game, focusing on using their content to craft a single-player campaign for BLOPSIIIII. (See? Ridiculous.)
With the PlayStation 5 and next Xbox consoles set to drop next year, it is likely to be a cross-generation game, and so Activision may be looking to have one of their higher echelon studios front the project as a result.
Kotaku is also quick to report that this change may have come as a result of two co-founders leaving Sledgehammer last year, and that the studio has had lots of their talent poached to follow their old bosses.
The only part of this story that we do know for sure is that we will be getting a 2019 Call of Duty reveal sometime within the next few weeks, what we think likely to be at E3 on Microsoft’s Xbox Stage on June 9th. While we’re not guaranteed as to exactly what we’ll see, no one would be shocked to see Modern Warfare 4 make an appearance, nor would it be completely out of the question to see Modern Warfare 2 be remastered, but hey, what do we know?