As the months tick ever onward, and November approaches, it’s inevitable that we’d start to hear rumblings about the new Call of Duty. The first hint of this year’s game has come from Polygon’s posting of the very first screenshot from CoD: Things Go Boom (or whatever it’s going to be called).
Polygon says the shot was captured from a video shown at a talk given at last month’s Game Developer’s Conference delivered by Sledehammer Games’ Michael Condrey and fellow studio co-founder Glen Schofield.
As you’ve seen, it’s not exactly the most spectacular image ever released – it’s just a dude’s face with another dude’s blurred head in the background – but it does hint at better visuals than we’ve seen from the series before. That said, it’s not clear whether this is a next-gen-only shot, or if this impressive facial mapping graphics tech will make the older console versions look just as good.
I must admit to being a sucker for eye candy, and Call of Duty’s relative lack thereof over the past few years has bothered me a bit. Sure, Ghosts made up for it somewhat by pulling off a constant barrage of insane action-movie sequences that left my heart pounding, but even so there’s a part of me that would really like to see something in a CoD game that makes me stop and go wow, this really is next-gen stuff.
Looking at the detail present in this rather limited screenshot, it’s quite possible that’s what this year’s iteration is going to deliver on the graphics front. The texture of the soldier’s skin is minutely detailed, and the way the lighting interacts with his cheekbones is, on the face of it, quite impressive, so hope is high.
This year’s Call of Duty is currently in development at Sledgehammer Games, the studio that previously worked on CoD: Modern Warfare 3. Sledgehammer was recently integrated into Activision’s Call of Duty studio line-up alongside Treyarch and Infinity Ward so that each new game would have a three-year development cycle, a window that will hopefully allow them to polish each year’s game into a shining jewel of first-person shootery goodness.
Expect more on the next Call of Duty at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, which is coming up in early June.
[Image Credit: Polygon.com]
