Next Call of Duty will be a "next-gen-first development," says Hirshberg

Sledgehammer Games is working on the next Call of Duty, and according to Activision's Eric Hirshberg, the game will be developed primarily for next-gen consoles.

In an interview with IGN, Activision's publishing CEO, Eric Hirshberg, shed some light on how Sledgehammer is handling the development of the next Call of Duty.

"Sledgehammer is approaching this as a next-gen-first development.

"Obviously in the console-transition year, anyone who developed a cross-generational game last year had to deal with the fact that the technology of the next-gen platforms was still coming into focus and changing quite a bit during the development process…. Now that we have the next-gen hardware out in the marketplace and solid, that is our primary development," he added.

This follows Activision-Blizzard's latest financial report, during which they announced that the franchise will be handled by three studios going forward, Infinity Ward, Treyarch and now Sledgehammer.

The publisher also announced that each game will now be moved to a three-year development cycle, instead of the usual two-year cycle.

Hirshberg commented about that saying, "with the level of content we were putting in the games, it became a real horse race each and every time to get everything done that we wanted to get done, we’ve got more capabilities [with next-gen] than ever before to play with and we want to make sure our developers have the time to innovate, iterate, to bring the best creative vision and the most possible polish to each and every game."

Do you expect this year's Call of Duty to be better for it? Let us know your thoughts.