After a two-minute recap montage of everything that's happened thus far in the narratively impenetrable Modern Warfare saga -- wow, I did not remember a lot of that! -- two people took the stage. On the left side, standing in front of a giant Infinity Ward logo was Robert Bowling, "creative strategist" at the troubled developer and, obviously, not one of the studio's now-fired founders. On the right side, standing in front of a giant Sledgehammer Games logo, was Glen Schofield, head of the newly formed studio that was originally slated to "extend the franchise into the action-adventure genre." Now, they were both on stage flanking an even larger Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 logo.

"For the last year we've been working together with Infinity Ward to deliver Modern Warfare 3," Schofield told the crowd in Los Angeles last week, forcing every games journalist there to wonder how things were going before Sledgehammer pitched in. "We came out of Modern Warfare 2 with a very strong vision of what we wanted for Modern Warfare 3," Bowling chimed in. "Things we wanted to add, things we wanted to polish, the payoff we wanted to deliver to our fans who've invested come November 8, 2011. Luckily, in the execution of that, we were looking for a team that had the same passion for the franchise, the creative skillset we could turn to, and we found that in the entire studio of Sledgehammer Games."

And that was all they had to say about the unusual circumstances that led to both men presenting what is arguably the highest-profile release of the year on stage with each other. "Like Infinity Ward, we believe the game should do the talking," Schofield said, effectively ending that portion of the presentation.