Might the next Call of Duty be set 15 years in the future?
Birds fly, sun shines, grass grows, and Activision’s internal studios release a new Call of Duty game every year. So, even if we hadn’t already had some hints that this holiday season would see Treyarch’s next turn at the plate to follow up 2010’s Black Ops, everybody and their mother’s dog saw it coming anyway.
But whereas Black Ops had been set in the Cold War, Treyarch’s prior venture World at War had been a World War II piece, and Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare series have all taken place in an approximation of the present day, the video you see here to the right might just indicate that Black Ops 2 could take us for a jaunt into the not-too-distant future.
In the video, “FPS Russia” operator Dmitri Potapoff (actually a not-Russian named Kyle Myers) plays with a tablet-controlled quadrotor aircraft, which is equipped with a submachine gun of its very own. He tells us that this is experimental, futuristic technology that is at least a decade away from seeing real use in combat, and proceeds to blow up some terrorist mannequins. Seriously, what did those mannequins ever do to you, man?
At the end of the video, Potapoff says that while this sort of device won’t be practical for another 15 years, gamers can expect to check it out in this year’s Call of Duty. Given that this video seems to have official ties to Activision (which would make a hoax significantly less likely), this is likely not just a sneak peek at some of the military hardware gamers will be rocking in-game this winter, but also a possible hint that the game might be set around the year 2027 or so.
Either way, it’s fun to speculate. Some speculators have tried to link the “Tacitus” t-shirt Potapoff is wearing (and to be fair, he did tag “tacitus t-shirt” in the YouTube tags) to the Roman historian Tacitus – who famously wrote about a solar eclipse being interpreted by some soldiers as an omen. There will be a solar eclipse this year on November 13th, which is always around the time that COD gets released anyway, so we’re all free to read into this however we want.
However, Potapoff himself says that “Tacitus” has nothing to do with the historical figure. So either he’s lying, or everybody’s barking up the wrong tree. Rumors have a proper BlOps2 reveal slated for the beginning of May, however, so we don’t have long to wait.
(Via Paradox)
