After the leaks, it’s official: Call of Duty is returning to World War II, specifically, from the looks of things, the European theater and Normandy. We’ll be following the Big Red One, aka the 1st Infantry Division, which has seen continuous service since the US got into World War I and has some fairly storied history behind it.
The trailer makes it pretty clear that we won’t be jumping around the world or hopping theaters, unlike the globe-spanning Battlefield 1 and its take on WWI. Truthfully, that makes some sense if they’re sticking with the 1st. That division was the first off the boats at Normandy, and fought the Nazis across France in an ongoing offensive before laying siege to Aachen, which is presumably where the game winds things up. During World War II, the division earned 16 Medals of Honor, also something that’s likely to come up during the campaign.
As for the franchise’s return to the war that spawned it, and the Nazi-killing that made its name, one hopes that Sledgehammer and Activision will make an effort to give the game a little more depth. After all, there’s a reason so many men from the 1st died to free France.
(via YouTube)