Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 "Will Push the Envelope With Innovation"

During a recent earnings call, Activision Blizzard president and COO Coddy Johnson provided a status update on Activision's performance during the latest financial quarter, as well as provided some words about what is ahead for the massive American publisher.

Naturally, during the earnings call, there was a lot of talk about Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, the latest installment in the iconic first-person shooter series poised to release later this year.

While speaking about the game, Johnson interestingly noted that Black Ops 4 "is a game that will push the envelope with innovation." Now, if you're a Call of Duty fan, you will know that innovation isn't exactly what the series is known for pushing, at least not of late. When you combine the series' annual release with the financial stakes at play with every installment, there's not a ton of wiggle room left for innovation. That isn't to say the games are bad or trite, rather they dabble more in refinement than pushing the medium forward.

However, the series hasn't always been completely void of innovation, though you do have to look all the way back to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to find it. But back in 2009 when Modern Warfare 2 did hit, it not only offered innovation, but it changed the landscape of first-person shooters forever. To this day, its impact and influence is still reverberating. Since its release, the new wave of battle-royale games is the only thing that even comes close to impact and design upheaval.

All of this begs the question: is Black Ops 4 poised to be the next Modern Warfare 2 in terms of game-changer levels? Is this what Johnson means by innovation? Who knows. It may just be a buzzword to get stakeholders and investors buzzing. As the cliché goes, only time will tell.

Elsewhere during the same earnings call, Johnson also talked about how Activision is investing more resources and development time into the game's PC version than it has in the past.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is poised to release on October 12, 2018. A full reveal livestream is slated to hit in a few weeks on May 17th. Perhaps, we will know more of what exactly Johnson means by "innovation" after this event.