call-of-duty-4 posts

Developer Infinity Ward has been doing more and more to connect to the ever growing Call of Duty gamer community. This week the creators of the shooter franchise launched their own Twitter site. Ah, but it's not just your normal Twitter page. This site is letting anyone with access to Twitter give their suggestions to the development team,

Currently the site is asking folks to "Name one thing you'd like to see in Modern Warfare 2" which is yet another official (but still unofficial) declaration that the team is indeed working on the sequel to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Not only can you give your suggestions to the Twitter live feed but you can track and vote on other people's posts as well. There's even a leaderboard where you can see which users are highest in the voting. Will this new community outreach be a help to Infinity Ward? Who knows..but it's still pretty cool.

The original founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, is putting his name behind a new play-to-prize online gaming service called GameWager. Yep, we know...we have seen similar businesses crash and burn over the years but this effort is different in that you are playing to win prizes rather than real money.

The site currently support a number of games like Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4 and others with support for games like World of Warcraft reportedly coming soon. Sign-up for the program is free and then players compete in GameWager-supported titles only. Players wager and earn virtual tokens for things like in-game kills and accomplishing objectives. Those tokens can later be turned in to win prizes like laptops, graphics cards and other items. It's not currently clear what role Bushnell has in this new business nor where the service gets its revenue from.

2009 is now firmly underway but some companies are still looking back to the past 12 months. One of those companies is Nielsen who is best known for their TV ratings system. Today the company announced their 2008 top 10 lists covering entertainment and ads in a variety of catagories. One of them was for the top 10 PC games that were most played in the US (the ratings were actually for activity for January-October 2008).

It's not a shock to learn that Blizzard's hit MMO World of Warcraft was the number one PC game that was most played according to Nielsen. The study claims that the game is played an average of 671 minutes a week, or just over 11 hours, per gamer. Nielsen also claims that every minute about .723 percent of all PC gamers are playing World of Warcraft, a massive number that blows away every other game on the top 10 list. A number of older games are on the list including the PC version of Halo and web browser based MMO RuneScape:

1. World of Warcraft
2. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
3. Halo: Combat Evolved
4. The Sims
5. The Sims 2
6. RuneScape
7. Diablo II
8. Team Fortress 2
9. Counter-Strike
10. Counter-Strike: Source

So when you have reps from Activision come out to a major upfront ad event for the in-game company Massive and announce your 2009 game line-up, including the title Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and you have more than one media outlet attending and reporting on said event, wouldn't you say that's pretty official?

We would but Activision apparently does not. So just to play the "fair and balanced" card, the publisher has officially told Videogamer.com that those media reports from both Newsweek and MTV Multiplayer were "speculative as far as we're concerned". Uh-huh.

The phrasing of their official statement doesn't call the announcements false, just "speculative". We think that Activision wasn't prepared for news reporters coming into the Massive upfront event and were a little looser in revealing their future plans than they would have been had they known a bunch of media types had infiltrated. In any case, it would be a massive shock if Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was not in the works, was not being developed by Infinity Ward and wasn't coming out in fall 2009.

It's not exactly a huge shock but it's still very cool to hear the official news. MTV Multiplayer reports that during a presentation for advertisers at Microsoft's in-game ad division Massive it was revealed that Activision will be releasing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in the fall of 2009.

While the report had no other details, it's likely that Infinity Ward is the developer for the game. They created the franchise and also were the team behind Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007 which was by far the most successful entry in the series. The title seems to suggest that the new game will be a direct sequel to the events in Call of Duty 4. The report also has reveals of other upcoming Activision games which are likely console only titles (including a James Bond themed racing game from Bizarre Creations).

It's hard to believe it but Activision has decided to make their massive selling Call of Duty shooter series an annual affair, much like an EA sports game. That means every year for as long as we can forcast, there will always be a Call of Duty shooter title. Last year the creator of the series, Infinity Ward, blew everyone away with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. With an all new present day setting, a great looking in-house graphics engine, excellent single player gameplay and innovative multiplayer features, it was a home run in both quality and in sales.

So with Infinity Ward presumably working on yet another game in the franchise for release in the fall of 2009, it fell to another Activision developer, Treyarch, to come up with 2008's entry in the series. The final result, Call of Duty World at War, is still entertaining but it's also clear that Treyarch didn't want to break away too much from what made Call of Duty 4 so successful.

One week after the game shipped to stores, Valve has now made the PC version of Activision's Call of Duty: World at War available for purchase and download via their Steam service. There's no 10 percent deal on this new game, however. You will have to pay the full $49.95 purchase price as you would with the retail boxed version of the game.

All of the previous Call of Duty games, including last year's best selling Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, have been available via Steam for some time now. While there's no word yet on the new game's US sales, Gamesindustry.biz has posted word that in the UK, Call of Duty: World at War has outsold last year's Call of Duty 4 by a 2 to 1 margin in its first week.

When it comes to a particularly good game, what matters most? I'm not talking about the old checklist videogame reviewers used to rely on -- and often still do -- such as music, graphics, presentation, etc. What I'm getting at here are the qualities which make a game stand above the rest in our collective minds. I've boiled it down to five particular areas in which I think a game needs to nail down in order to be more than the sum of its parts.

It was one of the biggest selling games of 2007 on any platform it appeared and now Call of Duty 4 developers Infinity Ward will officially be back to handle another installment of the first person shooter series in 2009. This bit of news came from the annual analysts day for publisher Activision.

The not terribly surprising news at least assures fans of the series that Infinity Ward will be returning to the game series that they started for Activision in 2003 and continued two years later with Call of Duty 2. Those titles were WWII shooters but the move to the modern day for 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare seemed to hit a nerve with gamers as it really took off, selling a total of 10 million units. There's no word yet on what setting 2009's Call of Duty game will take place in. Infinity Ward is also supposedly working on a new original property.

This video for the upcoming 007 James Bond game, Quantum of Solace, discusses adapting the Call of Duty 4 technology.

Download the HD Quantum of Solace "Technology" Video (34 MB)
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