What if ‘Call of Duty’ delays ‘Black Ops Cold War’ for ‘Modern Warfare’ Year 2?

We are officially entering “okay, it’s getting weird now” territory with how long it takes for Activision to announce this year’s Call of Duty, which is likely to come out in October or November, and here we are, pretty much August.

Enough leaks have happened now where we all think we know what it is, Black Ops: Cold War, a return to the “roots” of that subset, and it hasn’t been officially announced yet, and the leaked Doritos packs and such are really The only information we have about it.

While I think Activision will surely continue the Cold War, I wonder what is taking so long and what could be going on with the development of the game where they wait so long to show it, months after it would normally have debuted around E3 time.

Here’s the thing:

This is a very strange development cycle for this year’s Call of Duty.

Activision has been running a three-year rotation between Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer, and this year was supposed to be Sledgehammer’s turn. But supposedly, whatever they were working on wasn’t considered good enough, so Activision decided to turn to Treyarch to make a new Black Ops game a year earlier with Sledgehammer and other studios working.

This is also a cross-generation launch game, which adds additional complexity when you’re not only doing something for PS4, Xbox One, and PC, but also for PS5 and Xbox Series X. The last time this happened was Call of Duty Ghosts, and that was a disaster.

And finally, all this madness was in place before We had a massive global pandemic that forced almost everyone to work from home indefinitely, making video game development that much more difficult. So I wonder how a project that has already been crushed by time has been affected, and I’m curious to see if this game launches without a campaign, or without zombies, or with nothing else people expect from a launch of COD.

That’s why I wonder if the answer to this current problem is simply … doing some more Modern Warfare content in its place for a full year, and letting Black Ops arrive when it was originally supposed to, 2021.

Modern Warfare has been an incredibly well received game and everyone is still having fun playing it. On top of that, we have Warzone, a massively popular MW-linked battle royale, which yes should also be used as a promotional link for Black Ops, and could still continue to pair with MW for another year. If you can convince players to pay for all season passes in a given year for Warzone, that’s another $ 60 for the franchise there.

To me, this seems like a good compromise in the middle rather than rushing into a Black Ops game that may not be ready this fall. Is it bad to miss new COD sales? Certainly, and there would be no precedent there no be a COD launch in a given year. However the everything The entertainment industry is experiencing an unprecedented moment. I mean this year there’s literally no summer box office in the film industry. It is not irrational to say that maybe yes, Call of Duty is delayed for once.

Do I think this will happen? Probably not. Even with all the silence surrounding the new game, we are getting closer to what appears to be an impending announcement, and leaks indicate that the Cold War is happening. But I would be a bit surprised if it was as robust as a normal Call of Duty, as it seems that between the already set development time and the pandemic, it had to give something to make this happen. I guess we’ll know more soon.

Follow me On twitter, Youtube and Instagram. Pick up my science fiction novels Herokiller and Herokiller 2and I read my first series The Earth Born Trilogy, which is also in audio book.