Sledgehammer’s 2020 Call of Duty game was scrapped in favour of Black Ops Cold War because the game was broken. Team demoted to work on free-to-play mobile game.
Not at all surprised! SledgeHammer Games have completely botched their Call of Duty game. According to insiders it is an unplayable mess. What exactly does this mean for the franchise going forward?
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What happened to the 2020 SledgeHammer Call of Duty game? It seems a little like history is, kind of-sort of, repeating itself. Yet another in-house developer working on Call of Duty got fired by Activision. This time, though, for the completely opposite reason.
Well, let’s be fair. SledgerHammer Games was in free fall after two of their co-founders decided to move onto other projects within Activision. Michael Condrey and Glen Schofield were some of the most notable names at SledgeHammer until February 2018. They also played a huge part in the IP’s success and had worked on the franchise for 9 years.
Their departure was described as “a drastic shake-up in leadership” which left the rest of the team without vision or drive.
After almost two years of developing the new Call of Duty game SledgeHammer have come up short with delivering anything close to resembling a playable game. Activision are not happy and have pulled the plug on SledgeHammer’s game, and sacked the developers. All eyes were on Treyarch now as the burden is on them to release Black Ops 5 (Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War)in in 2020. And looking back, that wasn’t such a terrible decision.
This news is actually a blessing in disguise. After the majority of Infinity Ward left to to form Repsawn Entertainment, Treyarch became the power house Call of Duty developer. This is evident with the last year’s Call of Duty: Blacks Ops 4. Critics loved it across the board, scoring it 8 and higher, and in my honest opinion offers the best Battle-Royale experience to-date; Blackout.
Activision’s decision to drop the game and ax the studio shows that they still passionately care about their IP. They could have gone the way of Gearbox a la Colonial Marines and just released a broken shell of a game to cash in on their failures, but they didn’t. Instead they’ve completely scrapped SledgeHammer’s game, sent majority of the developers packing, and put all their eggs in Treyarch’s basket.
Treyarch released Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War last month and it is sitting at a a solid 75% on Metacritic. It also boasts the smoothest multiplayer experience of the franchise thus far. Sadly, people aren’t loving the crazy futuristic weapon in Cold War.
As for SledgeHammer, they have been demoted to working exclusively on a free-to-play Call of Duty game that will most likely launch later next year (2021). The game is rumoured to be a mobile exclusive title.
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