Last night, Destructoid took the wraps off this year’s upcoming Call Of Duty game, knocking down the finely crafted marketing sand castle of Activision, which wasn’t planning to share these details until Sunday. With sand in its eyes and fury in its non-existent corporate heart, Activision went ahead and coughed up the goods. The new game features a performance from Kevin Spacey and is titled Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare (because, you see, it takes place further in the future than Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare.) You can tell it’s the future in the trailer because there are hoverbikes and exoskeletons and sticky gloves that help you climb walls.
Connecting a few dots—the rhetoric of Spacey’s character in the reveal trailer combined with the weird fact that Call Of Duty is sponsoring a Vice investigation into private military companies and “what happens if they stop taking orders and start taking over”—it’s a safe bet that Spacey’s character is the head of a military contractor who decides to go rogue with his soldiers-for-hire, making him the game’s charismatic villain.
Advanced Warfare is being made by Sledgehammer Games, the Activision-owned studio founded by former Dead Space developers. This makes Sledgehammer the third Activision team to be married to the Call Of Duty series. The studio will be shuffled into the developer rotation with Infinity Ward and Treyarch, which have been taking turns making Call Of Duty for more than a decade. Platforms were not announced, although Activision has formerly said it is focusing Advanced Warfare on newer systems, and the trailer notes that its footage was taken from the Xbox One version of the game. It’s scheduled to be released this Nov. 4.