The Call of Duty game of 2025: a return to a theme that hasn’t been seen for a long time.

Next year, the Call of Duty series will change a bit, because we won’t get a new episode, Treyarch’s work will come in 2024, which will probably be Black Ops. After that, it’s back to Sledgehammer Games, which will have to prove that it can do better after the misguided Vanguard. And it will have the chance to do so, because it’s supposedly working on Advanced Warfare 2, which means we’re going back to the future.

Whatifgaming.com has reported that Sledgehammer could finally return to modern, or futuristic, warfare in 2025 after the fronts of World War II, as the studio is working on an Advanced Warfare sequel. The original plan was supposedly to expand on the characters and story of Vanguard, but the game didn’t do well, underperforming expectations, so Sledgehammer Games had to develop a new idea. A leaker called The Ghost of Hope, who had some Call of Duty info that turned out to be credible, confirmed the Whatifgaming.com report, although Charlie Intel disagreed. CI also frequently leaks CoD parts and they usually come in, so we can take his word for it. A representative of the site wrote on Twitter that they can’t confirm that Advanced Warfare 2 is coming in 2025 at all, and that this seems illogical in light of the fact that Modern Warfare II is getting a two-year cycle. Treyarch’s game would not get one if another Call of Duty came out a year after its release. According to Charlie Intel, this leaves the two-year cycle as the new paradigm, leaving Advanced Warfare 2, or at least its 2025 premiere, very much in doubt.

Of course, this is not official information, so treat it all with reservations! Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was released in 2014 for PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, with a backstory set between 2054 and 2061, and a campaign that presented a futuristic, fictional conflict with upgradeable armour and weapons.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II will be released on 28 October, but until then, read our article summarising the beta test experience!