We very much dislike posting anonymous tips and will hardly ever do it unless there’s some real good credibility behind it. We were sent a tip back in December and have been sitting on it for a good long while, hoping that sometime soon there might be some extra credibility to support the anonymous tip. With the news coming out on Thursday that Sledgehammer would be developing and releasing the next Call of Duty in 2014, we decided to go ahead and post the tip we were sent. Please, take everything you read below with a huge grain of salt, we are simply passing on the completely unverified information we received, nothing more than that.
According to an anonymous tip sent to us back in December, the next Call of Duty will be the fourth entry in the Modern Warfare series, developed by Sledgehammer Games. The game is set in the year 2018 as a direct sequel to Modern Warfare 3 with the game taking place across Europe and Asia. Captain Price and Nikolai are set to make a return as the two main lead characters and will return to their roles in the British SAS. According to our tipster, the SAS will play a major role in the campaign, most likely being the main focus instead of switching all around different soldiers and teams as in previous Modern Warfare installments. Nikolai will also be a playable character at some point in the game and will actually talk, a first for the Call of Duty series, excepting Price.
Now, the next part of this tip is what had us scratching our heads when we first received it. Our tipster reported that Shadow Company would make a return as the main threat in the game, which is plausible considering General Shepherd seemed to have had a pretty large group of soldiers loyal to his command. That detail makes some sense, but according to the tipster, Shepherd is alive and escaped to Europe following the ending of MW2. He will make a return in Modern Warfare 4 as the main villain according to our source. This seems implausible, considering the Modern Warfare 3 promotional Time Magazine cover poster, which says Shepherd was laid to rest at Arlington Cemetery.
On the other hand, no matter where you aim when you kill Shepherd in Modern Warfare 2, the knife will strike him in the eye. It’s plausible that it may have not killed him. It would be a big plot twist for Sledgehammer to pull off, but not out of the question.
The tipster also told us that there will be a stealth mission taking place in Amsterdam, and another place that will feature a mission will be Shanghai. Aside from the mention of the two cities being featured, other details were not given. From the sound of it, this won’t be another major World War or anything, but more of a focus on the SAS and their hunt for General Shepherd.
Back in January of this year, a LinkedIn profile was found listing a Sledgehammer employee working on the next entry in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise, found by
NowGamer. You can view a screenshot of the listing just below.
As we said above, we normally don’t post anonymous tips, but considering some of the details were spot on with Sledgehammer leading development and a release date of 2014, along with the Linkedin posting, we figured we’d go ahead and share the details. We are unable to verify the source’s reliability, so keep this squarely in the rumor category. For now.
To put this rumor in perspective, a user on the Call of Duty subreddit posted these details about
Treyarch developing a Call of Duty game for 2014, so we can assume that was certainly fake information there. There is a lot of interest in Call of Duty, and a lot of people willing to make things up. With Activision’s policy of not commenting on rumor or speculation, it’s difficult to verify anything. We’ll keep watching how this develops.