For the first time in a linear update for Battlefield (i.e. not Bad Company) we will have a single player campaign, which Activision and Infinity Ward say demonstrates EA and DICE’s fear of Modern Warfare – and a direct hit at how they run their games.

Eurogamer sat down with DICE to ask their opinion. “We’re not straying away from the formula,” Patrick Bach, executive producer says. He continued, “It is a very different feeling we’re going after. We’re not straying away from our own ideas. We are looking at our own stuff, maybe a bit too much at times because sometimes you forget to look at what everyone else is doing. But of course it adds a lot of pressure when people’s expectations are that maybe we should do something else, rather than doing what we’re doing.”

Spoilers were revealed in the interview (titled “The Making of Battlefield”) that show a shocking scene, much in the same vein as the Modern Warfare series. Famously the first MW iteration showed a nuke going off where, in first-person mode, you died. In the second game there was a scene where you play a terrorist shooting civilians.

A war of words is going to be the defining thing for both of these games, but something gives me the feeling that regardless, most FPS fans are going to end up with both games anyway!

And so, here’s a beta user crafting.

However every second year, COD gets rather good compared to the previous year. This is because the original studio releases their iteration of the franchise. They’re also quite big and can be a bit ballsy – even pissing off their bosses, Activision, occasionally.

In this instance, Modern Warfare gets more moderner.

So what’s the point of this post? A nice video detailing something we all most likely expected, a Call of Duty set in modern times featuring multiple online people shooting each other!

One of those is WWII-come-modern warfare action shooter Call of Duty, which – surprise surprise – is coming back this year with another installment.

Last year EA tried to get a bite of the modern warfare pie by rehashing their similarly-themed franchise, Medal of Honour. EA also own DICE, the renowned developer of the Battlefield series. And this year BF3 is coming out to redefine the genre it started. Activision are bluntly thanking EA in an attempt to get some headlines (it worked). Why are they thanking EA? Because they reckon BF3 is promoting COD.

Publishing boss Eric Hirshberg dismissed the threat of Battlefield 3, saying “It sounds trite but it’s true: we focus on what we need to do to make the best games we can,” he said. “We don’t pay much mind looking at what the competitors are doing. I know they are focused on us… well that’s all I’ll say. Well, I think EA might talk about our games in the press more than we do. So, the first thing I say to them is, ‘Thanks for the assistance in building awareness.’”

On the COD creators he said “We didn’t have any choice!. It shook my belief in two specific people, who were my friends.” The COD creators left in a hail of flame wars and money woes, moving to a new development studio they set up to begin work with Activision’s arch enemy – EA.

“The frustrating thing about that is, the stuff that these guys did, I never would have expected them to do. We’re a public company, we’ve got ethics obligations, and the things they did were… I would go to jail if I did them. You can’t use the company and the company’s assets for your own personal benefit, and you can’t use the leverage that you might have for personal benefit – you’re not allowed to do that! And so we didn’t have any choice.”

Going on to Infinity Ward’s current status, he said:

“There’s 70 really talented people at Infinity Ward who are focused and engaged – and in the last six months, we’ve had something like 5000 resumes, so it’s not like there’s a shortage of interest in working there. It’s one of those things where you get personally disappointed in people you trust and call friends. When you’re betrayed by your friends, what do you do?”

He said he can’t talk about IW’s next release, but it is likely to be Modern Warfare 3, under the COD monicker (the former IW execs are seeking an injunction to take the “Modern Warfare” name).

Speaking about his mortal enemies at EA, he didn’t hold back. “EA will buy a developer and then it will become ‘EA Florida’, ‘EA Vancouver’, EA New Jersey’, whatever. We always looked and said, ‘You know what? What we like about a developer is that they have a culture, they have an independent vision and that’s what makes them so successful. We don’t have an Activision anything – it’s Treyarch, Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer. That, to me, is one of the unassailable rules of building a publishing company. And in every case except for two, the original founders of the studio are still running the studios today. The only thing that we try to do is to provide a support structure to make them more successful. If you do a really god job – and a lot of our studios do – you get to pick what is, in my view, the most difficult thing to pick in the industry: to make original intellectual property.”

Speaking about Tim Schaffer, who is an oppressed Activision developer (Kotick said he was an oppressed EA developer) who was ditched by the publisher when he tried to release games through their channels, he said, “The guy comes out and says I’m a prick,” reference to an interview with Schaffer by Eurogamer, “I’ve never met him in my life – I’ve never had anything to do with him. I never had any involvement in the Vivendi project that they were doing, Brütal Legend, other than I was in one meeting where the guys looked at it and said, ‘He’s late, he’s missed every milestone, he’s overspent the budget and it doesn’t seem like a good game. We’re going to cancel it.’ And do you know what? That seemed like a sensible thing to do. And it turns out, he was late, he missed every milestone, the game was not a particularly good game…”

Kotick wrapped up by talking about the fact that he’s most hated for once saying he wants to “take the fun out of game development” by saying “That was a joke! The fact that there are people – and it’s a small vocal minority – that actually think that I meant it… How do you combat that? This is my dream job. I’ve been playing games since I was 18 years old. I could have bought any company, but I bought a bankrupt game company, and I’ve been doing it for 21 years. This idea that I’m not passionate about videogames is ludicrous. But you say something and it gets taken out of context.”

Activision appear to be doing just that, by ditching Playstation branding in the current UK print campaign for Call of Duty: Black Ops. The ad, spotted in Kerrang! Magazine, only features one console branding. No word exists on whether this is a beautiful relationship for the future or not, but it’s interesting to note. This stuff occurred at the start of the console generation – but a few years later the same mind games are going on.

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Well now you can pretend you’re a ginger twat, not by appearing on a horrific trainwreck of a documentary about Metallica crying in a therapy session… oh no, this time you can pretend you’re Mustaine without the moaning – kicking it to some tunes in Guitar Hero: Warriors of rock.

“Sudden Death” is the track to be featured, and will be the final track in the campaign of the game – meaning it’ll have suitably epic visuals to go along with the track! Check out the awful video below:

Speculation of such a thing came about originally around 2006/7 when Starcraft II was teased. But since then, all the talk has been about WoW expansions and of course, the newly released StarCraft II.

“Remember, we have two enormous investments,” said Kotick. “One in Bungie and the other in another project at Blizzard that we haven’t given a lot of visibility to. Those are going to be entirely new intellectual properties. But with the recognition that the way to build them is take long amounts of time, lots of capable talent, an enormous amount of capital and you have to have a real roadmap for innovation and creativity. And I think that those are going to be two very good examples from the ground up original ideas.”

Basically, a huge amount of money is being spent on two new IP’s which could save Activision from having to re-think its strategy about the waning Call of Duty franchise (now without the original team behind it and with increasing competition from EA’s Medal of Honour).

The years successes with Blizzard (World of Warcraft, no word on how amazingly Starcraft is doing) and Call of Duty were offset by poor sales of racing title Blur and Singularity. Blur only sold around 30,000 copies in the US, falling far short of expectations. “Singularity fell short of meeting what is an exceptionally high bar within the shooter genre,” said CFO Thomas Tippl.

“Fortunately, Call of Duty was the title that raised that bar and shortfall of Singularity was offset by Call of Duty’s catalogue and DLC performance. Additionally, Blur was not able to break out in what turned out to be a relatively soft racing genre despite the number of high-quality releases. “Importantly, the game broke new ground in creating innovative, social and multiplayer features – including functionality – enables our unique online and back-end platforms that will play an increasing role in driving value in the future.”

Weirdly, they said licensed titles sold very well. Transformers (the movie game, not War for Cybertron) and Shrek games sold well. Furthermore, stimulous packs for COD and WoW expansions kept the company afloat this year.

They went on to mention their new friends, Bungie, who will wrap up their final Halo game this year before focusing on new IP. “The majority of the Bungie team has moved into their new space and is now focused on crafting their new universe,” Tippl said.

Activision are sticking with it though, as they sell well in-between GTA iterations. And this time, the series goes where no GTA has gone before – Hong Kong. The game was due for release in 2010 but an earnings conference call confirms that the title will slip to 2011 to give the developers time to work on the title more.