Hutch Talks With Treyarch About Future of Call of Duty Franchise

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In response to a question asked by Hutch from a member of our Facebook community on this week’s live stream of the Call of Duty: Black Ops First Strike DLC, Game Design Director from Treyarch, David Vonderhaar, expressed his desire to set the Call of Duty franchise in the future. Near-future that is.

Hutch: “Would you ever consider making a CoD that was set in future? Either recent or far?”

David Vonderhaar: “I think the answer is ‘yes.’ I think it would be kind of a unique opportunity but the way that this works out is obviously more complicated than ‘Hey. Me and Treyarch are going to make a near-future shooter.’ It’s a tough question to answer. We have not announced any new Call of Duty games at this time but to answer his specific question I think, personally, it would be pretty fantastic to do near-future, you know? Not necessarily far-future.”

This is certainly not the first time we’ve heard about the possibility of a Call of Duty set in the future. In May of 2010, Activision registered a bunch of domain names relating to “Call of Duty: Future Warfare,” “Advanced Warfare,” Secret Warfare,” and “Space Warfare.”

Then in November, Gamasutra cited that unnamed  ”industry sources” have claimed Sledgehammer’s next joint will be a future-set Call of Duty. But with the recent development that Sledgehammer has slowed down development on their title to help out with Infinity Ward’s next game (presumably Modern Warfare 3), could this mean that Treyarch has been handed the future torch?

With all this madness on top of last year’s Infinity Ward debacle, the future (ahem) of the Call of Duty franchise is, in my mind, the biggest question mark in the video game industry right now.