Tony Hawk devs working on Call of Duty

The studio behind the Tony Hawk series and Guitar Hero have started working on Call of Duty. Evil Avatar note that their website has been updated with a message saying "we have molded our team into a crack squad of eager developers ready to push the First Person Action genre in support of Activision's Call of Duty franchise."

It's impossible to tell at this early stage, but judging from the cycling mocap studio shots and the job listings on the site, it won't be a small spin-off. The job ads require "experience designing top notch levels or gameplay experiences in shipped AAA titles" So there we are, Neversoft are the latest members of Activision's Call of Duty tag team, consisting of Treyarch, Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer and Raven.

Treyarch are busy putting together Call of Duty: Black Ops for release later this year. Based on previous form, Infinity Ward will be making Modern Warfare 4 for 2013, but a Neversoft project could give one of Activision's other studios an extra year or two to move CoD into an upgraded engine, though that may be wishful thinking. Frostbite 2 will start pushing 64-bit OS systems next year, with the release of Battlefield 3 and Medal of Honor, Call of Duty is in danger of looking increasingly dated.

PRODUCTS

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.