Next COD set in the future?

With this year’s Call of Duty now out in the wild, reports are once again predicting that the next iteration of the franchise will be set in the future.

Industry sources say Sledgehammer’s Call of Duty will be set in the future and feature, for lack of a better term, space Marines,” Gamasutra claims. [It’s] a very big step for a franchise that has historically based itself on realism.”

Such talk has been doing the rounds for years now, and will only intensify considering the big questions that still surround the direction that Call of Duty will take going forwards.

Were it not for the legal wranglings earlier this year that resulted in mass departures from developer Infinity Ward, it’s likely that 2011 would see a third release in the Modern Warfare series.

However, that’s now out of the question – instead, Activision’s recent assurance that next year’s COD is a large-scale Call of Duty FPS title” surely means that it will indeed be Sledgehammer’s still mysterious entry in the series.

If indeed the game does prove to be a sci-fi shooter it would make rumours that Respawn Entertainment – the EA partnered developer born out of the Inifinity Ward implosion – are making a sci-fi shooter all the juicier.

There’s always the chance, of course, that 2011’s Call of Duty could still be the rumoured MMO.

Talk of such a title has been bubbling for around a year, and in june of this year Activision boss Bobby Kotick admitted that he would love to see us have an online Call of Duty world”.