Let’s go ahead and get the major fact out of the way that we all knew a Call of Duty game would be releasing this year. What we didn’t know was what direction Treyarch would be taking this mega franchise. CoD gets passed around between two developers: Infinity Ward and Treyarch. Infinity Ward started the Modern Warfare series and spun that out to a trilogy while Treyarch was making the filler titles inbetween the MW releases. Treyarch received a lot of flack for taking on this role creating games like CoD 3 and CoD: World at War; both respectable and solid titles, yet didn’t live up to what Infinity Ward has created.

They finally unleashed a breakthrough title called Black Ops which went on to become the fastest and best selling CoD title to date. It wasn’t that they did anything revolutionary to the franchise, but put together easily the strongest story, in my opinion, and also kept the addictive multiplayer going. Once I was done with Black Ops, the single and multiplayer in which I spent many hours playing, I was for sure that Treyarch finally nailed it. We also know that Activision loves money, and seeing that Black Ops sold 5.6 million in the opening 24 hours, a sequel was probably planned that next day.

Now as we don’t have proof, we do have several leaked reports that a Black Ops 2 is in production which all makes sense. Activision has already said a CoD game is scheduled for this year and Treyarch is up to bat. The first report is from a blog called gameblog.fr that shows Amazon has created a page for Black Ops 2. It appears that page has recently been taken down showing they might have jumped the gun on that call. Activison has also recently bought domain rights to blackops2.com and some LinkedIn profiles from game developers have listed Black Ops 2 as items they are working on.

I think we can take all of this information and summarize that a new Black Ops is coming this year from Treyarch. In which I respond: fine. This doesn’t surprise me, I was expecting it, and all I ask is to make it interesting and fun. I know the series might be creatively bankrupt at this point but I don’t expect changes anytime soon. Are you guys still excited for the series or would it help for another studio to take it over?