Over the past year the Infinity Ward brand has taken a bit of a kicking, with a reported mass staff exodus following the dismissal of former bosses Jason West and Vince Zampella, but the Call of Duty studio is still in business and according to Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg remains a force to be reckoned with.
“I will say that the Infinity Ward that I’m meeting with today is one of the most talented developers in the world,” said Hirshberg. “There’s still a lot of talent and a lot of vision inside that studio, and if I had just woken up from a coma and never read a press release about Infinity Ward and just gone to my meetings with them, I would have walked out and said, ‘those guys are the real deal’.”
Not wanting to praise one child and forget about the others, Hirshberg also lavished kind words on Black Ops studio Treyarch.
“Treyarch is of course going to remain a centrepiece of our efforts on Call of Duty, and they have been. From the beginning, they’ve been contributing. I think that they’ve broke through to another level with this game,” claimed Hirshberg. “I think that they really just put their head down, tuned out the noise, and got to a pretty elite level in terms of the game that they’ve delivered here. They will, of course, figure prominently into our future plans and management of the franchise.”
And of the newest member of the Call of Duty family, Sledgehammer, Hirshberg added: “With Glen Schofield and their performance in Dead Space and what they’ve done in the past, I’ve nothing but high hopes for their contributions.”
He summed up: “We’ve got an unprecedented level of talent contributing to this franchise.”
Via IndustryGamers
Activision can talk all they want about how great a studio Infinity Ward is today, but the reality is that gamers will make up their own minds when its next game is released – whenever that happens to be.
However, the quality of Modern Warfare 2 and now Black Ops does mean that the bar is set very high.
