Call of Duty is returning to ‘traditional combat’

Activision has announced its best-selling first-person shooter will return to its roots with its 2017 instalment

This should not come as an enormous surprise to fans of first-person shooters, but Activision is taking the Call of Duty series back to "its roots". In a conference call to investors on Thursday, the publisher's chief executive, Eric Hirshberg, and chief operating officer, Thomas Tippl, both acknowledged that last year's space-based Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare had commercially underperformed. They promised that the 2017 instalment would return to "traditional combat" - a homely phrase which is likely to mean either a contemporary or historical setting.

The announcement reverses a trend toward ever more futuristic combat, which really began with the 2012 title Call of Duty: Black Ops II,partly based in a second cold war in the mid-2020s. Later, the poorly received Call of Duty: Ghosts, and the decent pair Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, wandered further into a speculative universe of drone warfare, mass electronic disruption and outer space dog fights. This trend was always questioned by hardcore fans of the series - which began in 2003 as a second world war drama - and was only going to become more obscure as studios faced coming up with ever more outlandish technological weaponry. Continuing along this narrative route for a few years we faced the prospect of holographic soldiers shooting each other with mind lasers - or even worse, a diplomatic solution.