I suspect that as entertainers and creative developers, we want to tell stories that haven’t been told in a while.

By the time we shipped that game, there was Elysium, Edge of Tomorrow, and a bunch of films all about the near-future. When we first started development on Advanced Warfare, the sort of near-future zeitgeist, if you will, hadn’t really blown up yet. We experienced that with Advanced Warfare as well. I think it comes down to wanting to tell stories that haven’t been told in a while. Why do you think there’s this throwback trend looking back to World War II right now?

It was coming off of Advanced Warfare, and we could have easily have done Advanced Warfare 2, but we saw a different opportunity. Three years ago we sat down and talked about the opportunity to go back to World War II after nearly a decade. Over the past few years, there’s been this resurgence of telling these stories that hadn’t been told in awhile. We didn’t know about Dunkirk or Allied or Hacksaw Ridge. If you think about when that was - around 2014 - there hadn’t been a renewed interest in World War II in film just yet. These are big games, and they take a big team a lot of time to develop these really robust experiences. The initial public announcement came in April 2017 that Call of Duty was going back to World War II. Michael Condrey, Co-Founder and Studio Head of Sledgehammer Games. In some ways, it’s a retelling of a story that’s familiar to many of us, but Condry told Inverse that exploring the personal stories of bravery, camaraderie, and sacrifice during World War II is an exercise worth repeating for the impact it has on new generations of people around the world. You storm the beaches of Normandy and push forward to win the war against the Nazis. In Call of Duty: WWII, players assume the role of a private in the 1st Infantry Division. The latest entry in the massively popular Call of Duty franchise abandoned recent progression towards futuristic gunplay and instead revisited its World War II roots with Call of Duty: WWII.ĭuring a conversation with Inverse at the Call of Duty World League event held in Dallas, TX in December, Michael Condry - the co-founder and studio head at video game developer Sledgehammer Games - revealed the compelling reasons why the franchise returned to the 1940s after nearly a decade of jetpacks and more futuristic weapons.

Call of duty wwii