Infinity Ward to Leave Call of Duty Franchise?

Rumours have been running amuck recently over whether Infinity Ward, the creator of the Modern Warfare series has left the franchise after its most recent installment. Infinity Ward as everybody in the world should know by now, created MW2 which sold record numbers of copies in the first 24 hours of its release. Not happy with just doing that it shut down most of the worlds major economies for a week and caused more than a dozen major releases to be postponed. Infinity Ward at this moment are confirmed to be working on a upcoming map pack for MW2, scheduled for a Spring 2010 release.

Though not confirmed it would appear from these rumours that Infinity Ward has left to go develop a new IP. Earlier sources reported that Activision added a third studio to the CoD franchise the newly formed Sledgehammer comprised of former EA Visceral executives. It was reported that this was too increase the production speed, but now it appears that it was actually to keep it to Activisions one game a year format.

However, last but not least this can only be good news for Treyarch the forgotten studio which has been stuck in Infinity Wards shadow since the release of Modern Warfare. Rumour has it that Treyarch to has finally moved on from WWII to cold war era game set in Vietnam. If all of this is true, this should be an interesting time for the Call of Duty Series as Infinity Ward says goodbye and Sledgehammer takes over the system that IW has worked into a fine art. It should be an easy job for Sledgehammer, with not much needing tweaking after the most recent installment besides maybe the "jelly blood". With Treyarch also hopefully exploring new territory with a new setting for their game it's just starting to get interesting.