There's no denying that the latest Call of Duty, Infinite Warfare, failed to ignite the player base like games of the series' past. In fact within just a few months of the game launching, almost nobody was playing it on PC and the console scene wasn't that much better. Because of this and the lacklustre sales it saw because of it, Activision is changing things up with its next game in the series.
Since the 2014 debut of Advanced Warfare, Call of Duty has become steadily more sci-fi like and with the release of Infinite Warfare, it jumped the shark and ended up on a number of space ships around different worlds. The WW2 shooter it started at, CoD is not. However that may change in the future, as Activision has specifically stated that it wants to take Call of Duty back to its roots.
The success of Battlefield 1 may have had something to do with that.
"In 2017 Activision will take Call of Duty back to its roots, and traditional combat will once again take center stage," said president of investor relations, Amrita Ahuja in an earnings call (via PCGamer).
It's not exactly clear what he means by traditional combat, but it may mean that we lose a lot of the series' "innovations," over the past few years, like sliding, double jumping and wall running - the kind of hallmarks that made Titanfall 2 so popular initially.
It may be that players don't want all that acrobatic action though and really just want to run on to machine gun fire.
Time will tell.
