Anyone still understand anything about Infinity Delay Ward’s intentions with their award-winning franchise? Long ago, I was under the impression that Call of Duty was a series of World War II games for PC and consoles, but I lost track somewhere for sure, and Call of Duty 2 HQ’s phonecall with Grant Collier, President and CEO of Infinity Ward, isn’t making things any easier.

With Call of Duty 2, everything was easy. It was set in World War II, like its predecessor, it was developed by Infinity Ward, like its predecessor, and it was a damn good game, like its predecessor. It did have a crap multiplayer at first, but it took them only 4 months to fix that and we’ve forgiven them by now. When you start taking dev studios Treyarch and Gray Matter into the calculations it gets tricky. Treyarch was responsible for the less-impressive backports of Infinity Ward’s cutting-edge stuff, such as for example Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, which had apart from the name and era less than nothing to do with CoD2 on 360 and PC.

There were some other rumors as well that Infinity Ward was working on a war game in modern Middle Eastern setting (how appropriate…), and Treyarch would be doing another WW2 shooter. That Treyarch game is confirmed to be Call of Duty 3 and will not be heading to PCs for sure, confirmed et al by Infinity Ward emailing me on the subject.

Now in the phonecall, Grant at Infinity Ward indicates that they are working hard on Call of Duty 4 indeed. No CoD2 expansion packs, but a whole new game. When inquired about the setting of the game, he got awfully quiet though: no confirmation of a WW2 setting, but no denial either. Combining this with the previous rumors, it wouldn’t be unlikely that they are going the Battlefield way and move into modern warfare. Perhaps CoD5 will also be future warfare? Nasty thing is that the IW guys are doing the PC version of CoD4, without any mention or confirmation of a console version. Don’t know about you, but I got lost somewhere trying to understand what the “versioning” means anymore in this franchise. CoD2 had a completely different inferior brother with the same name but another subtitle on other consoles, CoD3 will be console-only, CoD4 might end up PC-only.

Guess we’ll just have to wait until Grant spills some more solid beans, but somehow I can’t believe that after CoD2’s huge success they will skip the consoles with their next big release. As long as they make sure it gets a decent multiplayer right away, because we won’t be as forgiving if they try that crap again.