Infinity Ward will try to win your love back with more Modern Warfare

If you haven't heard, we will be getting another Call of Duty game this year. Yes, I know, shocking -- we've been getting one of those for literally a decade straight, and considering the annual success that the series is prone to receive, that likely won't be changing anytime soon. And with so many Call of Duty games being released, we now have three studios working on the franchise: Black Ops III developer Treyarch, Advanced Warfare developer Sledgehammer, and the studio that started it all, Infinity Ward.

Well, in a sense at least. Infinity Ward is at this point a shell of its former self -- following the firing of founders Jason West and Vince Zapella (and the departure of approximately a billion staff members with them), the studio behind Call of Duty Ghosts is pretty much a new one, IW in name only. And considering the very mixed response to that game, it's clear Infinity Ward has a lot to prove with their next Call of Duty game, set to launch at the end of the year. And what's the best way to win that trust? More of the same, of course!

According to a new rumor from TheTechGame (which, as always, you should take with a grain of salt, not believe until formally announced, etc.), the next Call of Duty game, currently untitled, will come bundled with a pre-order bonus of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 for Xbox One owners. This would fall in line with their initiative to get more backward compatible games for the system, and including older games in a series has been utilized by them in the past (mainly for the release of Fallout 4, which included a download of Fallout 3 as well.)

Now as much as I want this rumor to be true (since I would likely buy the game just to get both games, no joke), I'm really dubious. It seems like too much of a missed opportunity for Activision to bundle both games as freebies when the possibility of doing a "remastered" take on the series is more likely (this would just be the original games as is, par for the course with all Xbox One backwards compatible games.) Furthermore, it's pretty clear Activision has thrown themselves in Sony's court this generation, so why would they team up with Microsoft on something that would clearly only benefit their console? Yes yes "money" could always be that answer, but I doubt it -- as cool as this rumor is, I'm dubious of the possibility of it actually happening.

In any case, we'll know more about this new COD come E3, when it takes center (or at least part of) stage at Sony's annual press conference.