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Through the game's original announcement and since its next-generation console reveal, Activision has steadfastly refused to say if the game was coming to Wii U. The game's executive producer, however, just confirmed that it will. Mark Rubin, speaking to GameSpot at an E3 stage show yesterday, said the game will get a Wii U release but "we're not actually talking about the Wii U yet." You'll love the reason why. "Because we want to keep it mysterious. That's PR guys, that's not my fault." So. Thanks for not giving a straight answer to a simple question, Activision PR. "We're not talking about Wii U yet," as Rubin himself said, would have been an honest answer that doesn't rule out a version for that console. It's not like the Wii U is an insignificant constituency and it's not like they don't get super pissed off when the year's biggest release appears to be held back from their platform of choice, whether or not they plan to buy it. What was going to happen here, were we going to see some showcase event for the Xbox One and PS4 and then ... wait! That's the Wii U's music! As for a release date for Call of Duty: Ghosts: Mysterious Edition or whatever, that's hard to peg, too. Current generation console versions (and PC) release on Nov. 5. But when asked what generation Infinity Ward considers Wii U, Rubin said "that's probably in the next gen bin." Next gen Ghosts is planned for day-and-date console release, Rubin said. So will Wii U fans have to wait until both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 hit shelves? The relevant commentary begins at 13:02 of the video linked below. Call of Duty: Ghosts—E3 2013 Stage Demo [GameSpot]

Get the behind-closed-doors E3 experience with these gameplay videos for Call of Duty: Ghosts. We say that, because if you go to check out the game at the show, these videos are what you're going to see. And you get to do it without the cacophony of show floor noise and with the luxury of doing it in your pajamas to boot. Lucky!

Above is the underwater gameplay of "Into the Deep." If you've got any drowning issues, it's probably best to skip that one. After the break we've got next-gen dog attack technology in "No Man's Land," along with the 28-minute Call of Duty: Ghosts presentation from Sunday night.

The only video exclusive to E3 at this time is "Federation Day," which finds a squad of soldiers infiltrating a building by rappelling down it and then attempting to escape as the skyscraper collapses, but that should be available sometime after the mega convention concludes.

As I predicted, the E3 2013 exclusive Skylander is flooding onto eBay, as evidenced by this successful auction featuring the top photo I took for the previous article. Brand new and Sealed. Straight out of E3 Expo 2013. Extremely RARE and a must for Skylander fans and collectors. The following is "Color Shift" Hot Dog from Activision and only available at this years Electronic Entertainment Expo - E3. Can't be bought in stores. I managed to get this from a buddy who is part of the Skylander Development Team at Activision. Yeah, a buddy. Well f*** you, buddy — surely you have a camera at E3 and are capable of taking your own photos. You took a picture of the Bethesda lanyard, after all. Bah, who needs him? Let's erase this negative energy with a little Fatboy Zim.

During an E3 demo today, Skylanders executive producer Scott Krager announced that the newest entry in the series, Swap Force, will launch "day and date" for both the XBox One and PlayStation 4 -- though the specific release date (or dates) for these consoles is still unknown. In the meantime, some good news: in keeping with the series' tradition of cross-platform compatibility, the next-gen versions of Skylanders: Swap Force will use the same figurines as the current-gen titles, due to release for 3DS, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii U October 13 in the United States.

First look at gameplay from Bungie's highly anticipated new title.

The E3 videos for COD: Ghosts, or COD: DOG as we really should be calling it, are apparently ‘gameplay reveals’. There’s very little in the way of revelations though, unless the idea of following a dog as well as a man is the sort of overhaul that might make the war-tour appear to you. I reckon dogs improve everything by at least 25%, with the exception of cookery classes and intimate physical moments, but I’m still not particularly interested in wandering behind one during a war. The first video shows precisely that – at one point a character says he’s getting depressed and at the point I felt the sort of empathy that David Cage dreams of evoking. The second video involves scuba diving but, regrettably, the dog is gone by that point. You can watch them below.

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Say hello to Color Shift Hot Dog, the exclusive E3 2013 Skylanders toy Activision will be giving out at their Skylanders: Swap Force area when the show opens tomorrow. Shortly after that he'll be on eBay for several hundred dollars. Not this one, mind you. While he does look quite fetching in his packaging... ...I could never keep the cute little bastard cooped up in a plastic bubble. Freedom suits Hot Dog, allowing him to strut his color-shifting stuff. Brushed with two different colors of metallic paint, in some lights he looks like this: And in other lights he looks like this: He's almost a metallic amalgam of the Hot Dogs that came before him. Look for color-shifting Hot Dog all over eBay before the week is through.

A pre-E3 "all-access" event for Call of Duty: Ghosts is kicking off moments from now, showing off new gameplay footage from several of the game's campaign levels. You can watch all of it right here. This 30-minute stream will also include behind-the-scenes details and interviews with Infinity Ward, the studio behind this year's edition of the Call of Duty franchise. So, pull up a chair, assuming you're not already sitting in one. If the embed isn't working for you, pop on over to CallOfDuty.com or view it on the Machinima app on your Xbox 360. To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

I’m not particularly good at popular culture. What’s hip with the young cool-daddies on the streetwalks? I don’t seem to keep up. I’m too busy watching 1980s episodes of Spider-Man on Netflix. Turns out I’m closer than I thought, but unfortunately not old Teenage Mutant Ninja Heroes cartoons, however. Which means I’ve once again missed the zeitgeist. Activision haven’t, although their timing for the release of the latest attempt (the 37th, incredibly, but the first in four years) to make the anthropomorphised reptiles into a game could be better. With the first season having ended, and the second not starting until September, presumably they’re aiming to plug the Summer gap? Who knows – what I have noticed is that we’ve not posted anything about it, so why not enjoy some nostalgia-inducing trailers?

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The massive catalog of adventure games from Activision - which once upon a time were known as the Sierra adventure games - is 50 percent off on GOG until Monday, June 3.

The sale includes the Kings Quest, Quest for Glory, Zork, Space Quest, Police Quest, Gabriel Knight series and many, many more. They are all either $2.99 or $4.99. The entire portfolio can be yours for $121.

Also, there's no shame in looking up the answer to the Rumpelstiltskin riddle in King's Quest when you get stuck. We've all done it.

When Infinity Ward talks about Call of Duty: Ghosts' new engine, the term "new" carries an implied asterisk, at least according to animation lead Zach Volker. "When we're talking about a new engine, we're talking about upgrading significant systems within in that engine - we're not talking about throwing it all away and saying we're starting from the ground up," Volker told Official PlayStation Magazine UK.

Creating a brand-new, from-scratch engine on Infinity Ward's production timeline would require "an army of 200 engineers" according to Volker, so the distinction of "new" is made by how significantly upgraded the latest version of the engine is, as compared to the last.

"We say okay, what are the things that are significant," Volker said, "that are encompassing of the engine or its visual quality? Are those being upgraded in a significant way? Alright then, I think that warrants that we've got a new engine on our hands."

Bungie senior writer Eric Osborne didn't go so far as to outright confirm or deny the existence of a PC version of Destiny, though he did say that Bungie is "looking forward to talking more about that kind of stuff in the future" during an interview with IGN.

"We haven't said yes, and we haven't said no," Osborne said. "The more platforms we take on, the more work it ultimately becomes, and what we don't want is to compromise the core experience on any platforms. We have a lot of people who play on PCs. We have a lot of appetite to build that experience."

Right now, Destiny is set to launch for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One at an unspecified future date, presumably before the dystopian, near-extinct future in which the game takes place.

Bungie’s ambitious-sounding “sandbox” MMOFPS, Destiny, might not miss out on the One True Format after all, according to words spoken by writer and head of community Eric Osborne. In an interview with IGN he said:

“We haven’t said yes, and we haven’t said no… The more platforms we take on, the more work it ultimately becomes, and what we don’t want is to compromise the core experience on any platforms. We have a lot of people who play on PCs. We have a lot of appetite to build that experience. We haven’t announced it yet, but we’re looking forward to talking more about that kind of stuff in the future.”

So… do we want it? I really do like that concept art… But I am wholly indifferent to the CGI trailer, below.(more…)

Infinity Ward opens up about its shooter series' next-gen debut.

Call of Duty has a dog now. Not just one that attacks you in multiplayer, either. This one’s yours, and it’s meticulously mo-capped to boot. While last year’s edition was all about DRONES DRONES DRONES (and occasionally horses), Call of Duty: Ghosts is trying to tell a Truly Human And Emotional Story about “underdog” military men and their, er, actual dog. Apparently an “apocalyptic” event has left America’s army in tatters, so the Ghosts must strike from the shadows against some mysterious, overwhelmingly superior force. Naturally, explosions ensue, and lots of things fall down in cool ways. It’s all being brained up by Oscar-winning Traffic scribe Stephen Gaghan, which is maybe significant but probably not. But enough silly facts. After the break, you’ll find Ghosts’ first trailer, a drool-worthy RPS ‘SKLOOSIVE dogshot gallery, and probable proof that the dog is the centerpiece of the entire plot.

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You’ll have a dog in the next Call of Duty. You’ll be able to lean. You’ll be able to slide. And in multiplayer, you’ll be able to customize your character's avatar, switching bodies, heads and more. Call of Duty: Ghosts is making its public debut today as part of the reveal of the new Xbox, but don’t let the game’s good graphics distract you completely. The new graphics engine running CoDG isn’t the only big change. At an advance preview for Ghosts last week, reps from the Activision-owned studio Infinity Ward began sharing details for their new game, the November-scheduled Call of Duty that, had they kept the numbering, would be Call of Duty 10. Ghosts will be a game running in a new engine, in a “new world”, though don’t worry. We’re not going to Mars. At least, not that they’ve shown yet. Ghosts is set in modern day, at least initially, in a United States that has been attacked. Previous games let us be a superpower, the IW folks said. This first-person shooter pits us as the underdog. Apparently, this underdog has a dog. Infinity Ward is giving players a specially-trained, mo-capped military attack dog. We fight for him. He fights for us (sorry, nothing more specific regarding controls, or how much it can be commanded). Players will also be able to lean and slide in the interest, the developers say, of giving players smoother motion through their game world. The lack of lean in earlier Call of Duty games has been controversial among the player base, some of whom wanted that feature added to match other shooters. Infinity Ward is promising a 60 frames-per-second experience for what should be a slick and attractively detailed game. Some in-game flythroughs showed a lush jungle and a detailed riverbed. They look good, though players of high-end PC games will probably see in Ghosts’ next-gen graphics a level of visual fidelity they’re already used to. IW is proud of their new engine, hyping its higher polygon counts, tech for smoothing curves, making flat surfaces look bumpier than ever (should they need to look bumpy, of course!). What good are graphics for gameplay? That’s up to debate, but other engine accomplishments: smarter artificial intelligence of ambient life like the scurrying fish that get out of the player in an underwater level and “interactive smoke” promise to be more meaningful to the dynamism of the game. “This is not tech for tech’s sake,” says IW executive producer Mark Rubin . Ghosts will have multiplayer, of course. That’s probably why most people will buy it. Details are slim, though IW is promising that maps will be more dynamic, with events like floods changing a level mid-session. They plan to give players access to trigger-able traps and events, like the rolling of a bunch of logs onto an enemy. Players will be able to customize their multiplayer character, changing their heads, bodies and more. We’ll have more on the game in the days and months to come. To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo

The next-generation engine debuted in Call of Duty: Ghosts will not only power the franchise's signature 60 frames-per-second gameplay, but a more coherent experience overall. According to Infinity Ward executive producer Mark Rubin, Ghosts will stick with the same protagonist and squad of soldiers throughout the game.

"If you look at Call of Duty in general, you're on the high-tech, super-powered forces. You're America, you're strong, you're Britain, Germany," Rubin told Joystiq at a recent press event in Los Angeles. "It just felt like, what if we could reverse those roles a bit, what if we had America as the underdog and not the superpower? What if we had some other countries as the big superpower and we're fighting against this more technologically superior force. And so that is really where we got: now we've got this technologically superior super force, they devastate the western world, the US, with a weapon of mass destruction of some kind - I'm not going to go into that, it will come later, and what we did is we had that event start the game, but the story picks up ten to fifteen years later and you as a soldier grew up in this new changed world."

That soldier will be a focal point for the game, Rubin said, and won't contribute to the fractured, multi-perspective narratives for which the series has drawn ire in the past. "It's not like before where you have these multiple sides and trot around. You're pretty much the same person throughout."

You'll also be accompanied by a Navy SEAL dog (not to be confused with a Moreau-style seal-dog), which can sniff out dangers and aid the team in several ways as a companion AI of sorts. As you might expect from a production of Ghosts' caliber, Infinity Ward did full motion capture on a retired SEAL dog.

The latest Call of Duty, dubbed Ghosts, has drafted Syriana and Traffic writer Stephen Gaghan to provide its fiction.

Games don't get more Hollywood than Call of Duty, and Activision has shown little hesitance in acquiring composers and writers from the silver screen to aid in its ever bigger and brasher efforts. Gaghan's work on Traffic, a dour crime drama, and political thriller Syriana made him a standout candidate for Ghosts. The game follows the remainder of the US military in a world scarred by a weapon of mass destruction. According to developer Infinity Ward, Gaghan didn't swoop in and drop off a script - he requested an office, and worked from one amidst the game's single-player team all throughout the game's production. That's a sterling gesture, but I asked Call of Duty: Ghosts executive producer Mark Rubin to explain why Gaghan was deemed suitable to write for players, not viewers.

"Basically, we looked at his work - he's a great writer, no doubt about it and that's fine, there are probably lots of great writers out there," Rubin said. "So what we did is we actually got the chance to talk to him a long time before we decided to go forward with it. And we realized he was getting it. We've had writers before, and they know how to write, but they don't understand the game aspect of it.

"And I feel like with Gaghan, he really understood what we were trying to do. He asked more questions than try to sell himself, and that was, I think, a really big selling point. He was asking how things work and how we do things, and was really interested in how we craft the story, not from a writing standpoint but from the visuals and gameplay. He was really asking more questions. Although he was a gamer - he knew it from that side - he didn't know it from the dev side. He really was asking a lot of questions about the dev side, he really wanted to know more. I think that interest in what we were doing is really what drove us to him."

So, Call of Duty just teased this thing, which means we can look forward to a lot more about Ghosts at the next Xbox's big shindig on Tuesday.

How often in life do you get a second chance? If you’re an online Call of Duty player, well, that’s pretty simple – you get one every time you press Square to respawn. But the concepts of return, reinvigoration, and redemption all play into Uprising, the second map pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which is available today on PlayStation Network.

To start, Uprising features four new maps for Black Ops II multiplayer matches:
Vertigo, the top of a Tacitus mega-structure that’s so tall, it breaks the cloud layer; Magma, a small Japanese village that has been engulfed by the lava of a nearby erupting volcano; Encore, the performance stage and surrounding grounds following a London music festival; and Studio, a re-imagining of the Call of Duty: Black Ops Firing Range, offering chaotic combat over several movie sets on a Hollywood backlot.

Studio is a particular point of pride here, as it’s a re-imagining of Firing Range, which fans of the original Black Ops still eagerly choose in multiplayer lobbies. Its compact design and varied lines of sight – sniper perches, blind corners, tight alleyways – make it popular, but thematically, the original level is a bunch of plywood targets, purpose-built for training soldiers. Not only does the level look a lot more colorful now with the addition of crashed spaceships, animatronic dinosaurs, a pirate harbor, and a miniature monster-movie set, but these visual landmarks make it even easier to communicate. When a teammate calls out “there’s two in the pirate cove” or “I’m heading to the saloon,” there’s no confusion in the sitreps. And when you work together as team, you’ll find you don’t need second chances quite so often.

For Mob of the Dead, the question isn’t so much “how often in life do you get a second chance” but “how often in death?” Alcatraz is the setting for this star-studded adventure, as four gangsters – played by Ray Liotta, Michael Madsen, Chazz Palminteri, and Joe Pantoliano – seek to escape one of the world’s most infamous prisons. But as you might expect, the bars and cells aren’t the only things standing in their way. Zombies – the ultimate benefactors of a second chance! — have taken over the island prison, so these wiseguys will have to battle the undead if they’re going to make it out. New perks like the wittily named Electric Cherry offer players some shocking new gameplay mechanics, as does the new Afterlife Mode, which lets interact with your environment and solve puzzles despite having just had your existence expire. But like I said…a second chance is something you should never take for granted.

Uprising is available now on PSN for $14.99, but if you are the owner of a Black Ops II Season Pass, you already own it – just download it from the in-game Store menu.

One year ago, The Diablo 3 servers went public. In celebration of the Lord of Terror's re-birthday, Blizzard is granting Diablo 3 players some special in-game boosts. From now until May 21, all dungeon-crawlers will receive an extra 25 percent bonus to both Magic Find and EXP. In addition, this bonus will stack above the usual 300 percent cap.

In addition, many Diablo 3 Twitch streamers are holding celebrations of their own, hosting special streams and giveaways. You can find the schedule right here.

Last week, Blizzard implemented a boost of a different sort, massively expanding Diablo 3's in-game gold reserves, but that was an accident.

That’s subscribers. Not subway sandwiches. Don’t get me wrong: I’d definitely put out a press release and hold an investor call if I misplaced a veritable volcano fortress of sandwiches. In it, I would drastically downgrade my quarterly expectations and ask if I could borrow a few hundred-thousand loaves of bread from anyone. But anyway. Activision gathered its friends and countrymen for another sermon on the moneymount today, and of course, World of Warcraft was a big focus. And while the previous reported total of 9.6 million subscribers was still quite impressive in its own way, it wasn’t exactly on the up-and-up. Since the end of last year, the most massive player in the massively multiplayer arena has bled another 1.3 million people, their shiny crimson change pooling into the gutters below. The kicker? In a decidedly un-Activision move, the publishing behemoth’s actually starting to feel a bit worried.

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Blizzard's massively multiplayer online game is no longer quite so massive. World of Warcraft is down to eight million subscribers, publisher Activision-Blizzard said in a press release today. That's a 1.3 million loss from February to May—mostly in the East, Blizzard says, but in the West as well. The popular game is still the world's biggest subscription-based MMORPG, but subscriber numbers have been in decline since the game peaked at 12 million members back in 2010. World of Warcraft is also one of the last remaining paid MMORPGs; most online games, like EA's Star Wars: The Old Republic, are going free-to-play. Of course, with eight million people continuing to pay them every month, Activision-Blizzard probably doesn't have too much to complain about.

Blizzard rolled out patch 1.08 to Diablo 3's American servers yesterday and, along with it, a very substantial bug. The patch increased the stack size for in-game gold in the auction house from 1 million to 10 million, effectively making gold ten times cheaper. Players then discovered a serious bug: Canceling a gold auction refunded them double the amount listed. Streams of the bug in action soon spread the word quickly. Thanks to the higher stack size, players were reportedly duplicating trillions in gold. Some were buying up high-value items in the auction house, thus driving up prices and massively inflating the in-game economy.

Blizzard became aware of the issue last night and shut down the auction house. As of midnight Pacific, the company had created a fix for the problem, but it still hasn't been implemented. The studio has decided not to rollback the update, and will instead "make corrections" to individual accounts. Writing on the Diablo 3 forums, community manager Lylirra stated, "We feel that this is the best course of action given the nature of the dupe, how relatively few players used it, and the fact that its effects were fairly limited within the region."

We've contacted Blizzard regarding the current status of the problem.

[Thanks, Pablo and Erik!]

Sledgehammer Games is already working on its next game, the studio has revealed in a tweet congratulating Infinity Ward on its Call of Duty: Ghosts announcement. You'll remember the two worked together on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

"Our team is heads down on our next project, but best wishes to the hardworking team at IW!" the tweet read. Nothing specific was shared about this next project, but we've inquired with Sledgehammer Games to see if the outfit is willing to disclose any additional information.

Sledgehammer Games formed in 2009, when Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey left EA's Visceral Games and founded the studio under Activision. The original plan was to produce a third-person action game, but that would eventually get scrapped in the prototype phase.

The moon follows the sun, the early bird gets the worm, the alienated orphan becomes a vigilante superhero, and there is a new Call of Duty. These are all natural processes that feed the cacophonous, utterly meticulous system that is life. Do not fear them, for without their clockwork-like churning, we would simply cease to be. So then, what exactly is Call of Duty: Ghosts? Well, it’s not Modern Warfare 4, for one. Infinity Ward’s developing again, but this time, it’s headed into sorta kinda vaguely new-ish territory I guess. Utterly insubstantial teaser thing (because ghosts, obviously; or the obnoxious, backward-building nature of hype cycles) and a scant few details after the break.

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You might have heard today's big news: the next Call of Duty is called Ghosts, and it's coming to current- and next-generation platforms this fall. To be specific: according to publisher Activision, the game is coming to Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, and "next generation platforms." It's safe to say that means the next PlayStation and the next Xbox (as we'll see the game for the first time alongside the next Xbox on May 21). But what about the Wii U? Nintendo's newest console has always operated in that weird grey area between "current-gen" and "next-gen," and Activision won't say whether Wii U owners will be able to get their hands on the next Call of Duty, even though they got the last one. Right now, you can pre-order Call of Duty: Ghosts at GameStop or Amazon for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. No PS4 and no Wii U. The PS4 thing makes sense, as that machine isn't out yet. But if the game is coming to Wii U, why hasn't Activision said anything yet? We reached out to both Activision and Nintendo to ask whether the game is coming to Wii U. Neither party would comment. Weird, don't you think? I can think of two possible explanations: 1) Thanks to a partnership with Microsoft, Activision is waiting til the new Xbox reveal on May 21—when they'll show off Call of Duty: Ghosts for the first time—before they admit that yes, the game is coming to PS4 and Wii U too. Maybe the terms of this deal require Activision to stay quiet about those other "next-gen" platforms for now. 2) Activision is waiting to see whether the under-performing Wii U can pick up steam over the next few months before they commit resources to bringing another Call of Duty over. Or maybe the game isn't coming to Wii U at all. That sure would be a bad sign for Nintendo's new console, especially considering the promises made by Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, who was high on third-party support for the system when he spoke to Kotaku last year. "And the best part is that now with HD capabilities and a strong online system, third parties are gonna bring their best content to the Wii U," he said. "Because those were two key barriers that if I'm creating the latest Call of Duty experience and I'm looking to bring it to the Wii a year ago, in an SD format without a robust online experience, they made the decision not to do that." Worth noting: Infinity Ward, the studio behind Ghosts, has not traditionally supported Nintendo platforms. The Wii ports of Modern Warfare games were handled by Treyarch, which is also the studio that developed last year's Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Black Ops II came to Wii U last November. So far, third-party support for the Wii U has been rather inconsistent. Hopefully something changes soon—it'd be a real shame if the next Call of Duty skips Nintendo's newest console too.

Now that Call of Duty: Ghosts is an official thing—and since the only detail we're being given is something to do with masks, I think—it's an interesting time to look back on what the famous and one-time-infamous Call of Duty skull mask even is. You might not remember the event that tried to place infamy on the balaclava that Lieutenant Ghost (ahem, ahem) wears in Call of Duty. Luke wrote about it back in January, back before Call of Duty: Ghosts was a thing. But the interesting part here isn't the outrage that followed the erroneous assumption that real-life soldiers were wearing masks based on a video game. The interesting part is what the mask is all about. An excerpt from Luke's piece: ...skull masks (or balaclavas, which is actually what Ghost is wearing) are incredibly common in armed forces across the world, especially the US. American soldiers have been wearing them, and have been having their pictures taken in them, for years. This isn't one guy acting alone, it's an established "fashion" amongst soldiers worldwide. Which leads us to perhaps the more important point: the mask was not invented by Call of Duty, or its developers Infinity Ward. Indeed, its presence in the game was inspired by the mask's use by soldiers in real life, as it's been worn by US troops—who first took to it as a fashionable alternative from regular gear (it began life as a designer ski mask) at the beginning of the Iraq War—for almost a decade now, long before development ever began on the Modern Warfare series. It was even in Hollywood movies before it was in Call of Duty, with 2005's Harsh Times (left) featuring a scene in which Christian Bale is sporting a "skull mask" almost identical to the one "Ghost"—and now this French soldier—wears. It seems like Call of Duty: Ghosts might treat the mask as something more than a fashion statement.

Activision's annual blockbuster military shooter returns in November with Call of Duty: Ghosts, and in addition to this debut teaser trailer, the game is getting an "exclusive first look" at Microsoft's event for the next-generation Xbox on May 21. In a news release, Call of Duty: Ghosts was announced for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC and "will also be available for next generation platforms," which would include the PS4. No mention was made of a Wii U version. The game is back in the hands of the series' creator, Infinity Ward. "Everyone was expecting us to make Modern Warfare 4, which would have been the safe thing to do," Mark Rubin, the studio's executive producer, said in a statement. "We saw the console transition as the perfect opportunity to start a new chapter for Call of Duty. So we're building a new sub-brand, a new engine, and a lot of new ideas and experiences for our players." Don Mattrick, president of Microsoft's Xbox division, joined the statement released by Activision, saying that Call of Duty "has firmly established its home on the Xbox 360 with the game's largest and most engaged community." If Call of Duty is going on stage with Microsoft on May 21, that probably means Respawn Entertainment's shooter—rumored to be a next Xbox exclusive—won't be revealed at the same event, as that would make for a palpably awkward appearance. Respawn was started by the Infinity Ward founders Vince Zampella and Jason West in 2010, after an acrimonious departure from Activision that culminated in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit settled a year ago this month. Still, having close ties to both Call of Duty and a rival is a plus for Microsoft, said to be behind on producing its own content for the new console. Here is the PC version's box art: To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

Confirming rumors, Activision has revealed the next game in its billion-dollar shooter franchise; titled Call of Duty: Ghosts. The military-based FPS will arrive on the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on November 5, and on "next-generation platforms" on an unspecified date. No Wii U version was announced.

A press release reveals the next-gen version of Ghosts will sport an all-new engine "from the developer that started it all, Infinity Ward." The series has been using the same engine, with numerous annual modifications, since 2005.

Saying it would have been "safe" for Infinity Ward to develop a fourth entry in the Modern Warfare series, Mark Rubin, executive producer of developer Infinity Ward, noted his team saw the next generation of consoles as the "perfect opportunity" to start a new chapter for the franchise. "So we're building a new sub-brand, a new engine, and a lot of new ideas and experiences for our players," he added.

Activision will debut the next-gen version of Call of Duty: Ghosts - and revealing its new engine to the world - during Microsoft's upcoming Xbox 'Next Generation' event on May 21.

Ghosts features an "all-new gameplay experience built on an entirely new story, setting and cast of characters," the press release further detailed.

An onslaught of additional info and explosion-filled marketing is expected closer to E3 2013.