The Mog Blog

Whew boy… I honestly don’t know where to begin with all this news involving Activision, Infinity Ward and Bungie. The past few weeks was simply a cluster of confusion and frustration for Infinity Ward but also celebration for Bungie. In the middle of all of this is Activision. Just what exactly is going on?To sum it all up, Infinity Ward (known for the “Good” Call of Duty games which includes Modern Warfare) was the victim of a lot of controversy from Activision. What started with a seemingly random removal of two of the heads of Infinity Ward, Activision has definitely gotten its fans and press questioning their methods. As far as the story goes, two of the head employees from Infinity Ward were mysterious fired. 26 of Infinity Ward’s employees decided to ditch Activision. Along with that came two lawsuits, which mentioned royalties for Modern Warfare and also money being held from the employees in order to force them to work on Modern Warfare 3.

The outcome most likely will not involve a release of Modern Warfare 3 and definitely the death of Infinity Ward. However, the former employees of Infinity Ward has not given up and have opened up a new studio called Respawn Entertainment. Their funding will be from Electronic Arts.

Where does this put Call of Duty? Modern Warfare is still up in the air as to what will happen. However, Call of Duty as an entire series will keep on trucking with Call of Duty: Black Ops. Unfortunately, for those hardcore Call of Duty fans, it will be developed by Treyarch, the company behind Call of Duty 3 and World at War. No real info on Black Ops just yet though but there is a release date: November 9th 2010.

As for Activision, there is an interesting bit of news for those that are fans of Bungie’s work. Most people may remember Bungie most for the Halo series. Bungie has signed for a 10 year publishing deal with Activision. This very well means that Bungie can sell their games on other systems and in fact, they will. However, Bungie did also mention that Halo: Reach, the newest entry for the Halo series, will also be the last entry in the Halo series. So, we won’t be seeing Halo on Playstation 3 or any system really.

Personally, I enjoyed my way through Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2, both online and offline. I didn’t like World at War so much and I can only hope that they do Vietnam correctly (it is my people, after all). Bungie and Infinity Ward are both great developers and I am always interested in their work. Activision definitely is not a company that will die out because of what has happened. Sure, it all looks bad and frankly, it is bad, but Activision does have Blizzard, they have Guitar Hero and well, they have their methods of supporting all columns if one were to go down.