Sledgehammer Games has an underdog reputation in the Call of Duty franchise. Despite the team’s prior successes, they’re often delegated to support other studios. They’ve even completely changed the direction of their projects on short notice. The latest MW3 updates seem to point to this developer finally getting to make the game of their dreams: a follow-up to 2014’s Advanced Warfare.
What Is Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare?
In 2011, SHG proved themselves to Activision in support of Infinity Ward’s original Modern Warfare 3. As a result, Sledgehammer Games was given the green light to lead their own Call of Duty project, which became Advanced Warfare.
Advanced Warfare was, at that point, the biggest reinvention of the franchise. This game pushed the series into the future, set in 2054. This new era added Exosuits, which gave players massive double jumps and speedy dashes. The major overhaul to movement got eyes on the franchise in a big way. With this entry, Sledgehammer reinvented a stale formula. It couldn’t have come at a better time. Many fans were displeased with the franchise’s previous entry, Call of Duty Ghosts.
With a brand-new campaign featuring cutting-edge graphics, and Kevin Spacey at the peak of his popularity, SHG told a solid story. They envisioned a dystopian world where technology was owned by massive Private Military Companies. These mega-corporations, like Spacey’s Atlas, changed the way the Western world waged its wars.
The multiplayer in Advanced Warfare is lightning-fast. It introduced a collection of fictional weapons. Several of these were instant classics and became rightfully iconic for Call of Duty fans. Chief among them are the BAL-27 Assault Rifle and the MORS Sniper (pictured below).
Call of Duty Season 3 Adds Advanced Warfare Guns
If those weapon names sound familiar, that’s because they’re the most popular new additions in Modern Warfare 3. While it’s certainly been nostalgic to use guns that haven’t been in Call of Duty in several years, there’s more to their inclusion than meets the eye. CoD‘s history tells us that these guns may point toward the studio’s future title.
In every Call of Duty game, SHG has been the project lead on some of the post-launch weapons that served as teasers for their next title. Toward the end of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare’s life cycle, they added iconic WWII-era guns like the Sten, M1 Garand and MP40 into supply drops. While the inclusion seemed odd at the time, it made sense when the studio revealed they’d been working on Call of Duty: WWII in 2017. In that title, several of the weapons added in DLC were part of the arsenal available at launch in Call Of Duty: Vanguard.
Perhaps most puzzlingly, Call of Duty Vanguard Season 5 (also set in World War II) included the BP50. This bullpup assault rifle is based on the F2000, which wasn’t designed until around a half-century after WWII ended. Sure enough, the weapon was added to this year’s MW3, using the same name and a nearly identical model.
With things like this, I’ve always thought one is an isolated incident, two is a coincidence, but three is a pattern. I’d be willing to bet the inclusion of the MORS and BAL-27 in MW3 was a clever way for SHG to tease a future title and save their workforce development time. If the studio’s history is anything to go by, I’d expect these weapons to appear in the developer’s next project with an almost identical appearance to their MW3 design.
Devs Want Advanced Warfare 2 to Happen
Members of the team, both former and current, have gone on record saying that they’d love to revisit the world of Advanced Warfare. In 2023, Bret Robbins, former Senior Creative Director at Sledgehammer Games, interviewed with Ben Hanson for MinnMaxx. They spoke about Advanced Warfare 2, and Robbins said, “We started down that road. We had some early prototypes. I think we might’ve even done a demo level of it.”
As we know, the game didn’t come to fruition. Executives wanted the franchise to go back to WWII, where it began in 2003. This was likely done in response to fan fatigue from three future titles back to back. While going back to World War II wasn’t the studio’s first choice, there was still some excitement for that era at the team.
Sledgehammer Games has tried to get a sequel to Advanced Warfare off the ground. In a Report for Bloomberg, Jason Schreier stated that after Call of Duty: Vanguard, there was a pitch for a project under the codename “Anvil“. Anvil was set in “the universe of the company’s futuristic 2014 game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, according to the people familiar.” Apparently, the project didn’t see much progress before Sledgehammer Games was assigned to work on a Modern Warfare title. This became 2023’s Modern Warfare 3.
It’s Time for CoD To Head Back To the Future
Clearly, Sledgehammer Games wants to make a follow-up to Advanced Warfare, and I can see why. In a way, it’s their magnum opus. The original seems to be the game they truly wanted to make, with far less influence from executives than any of their subsequent releases. There could be critical and commercial success to be had as well. Advanced Warfare garnered an 81% on Metacritic, and was the highest selling game of 2014 despite releasing in November of that year.
With an apparent passion for the game among devs, an AW comeback could be a huge success. Especially since it will be a decade since CoD had a title with 3D movement by the time Sledgehammer is at bat to lead another installment in the franchise. If there’s another attempt to get an Advanced Warfare sequel made, here’s hoping this time Activision and Xbox see the vision.
