Call of Duty 2016 might be the first military shooter to tackle future warfare!

Well, that's a whole heap of serendipity there, isn't it? Literally a day after rumors began floating around about a future-set Battlefield 5, new rumors are now circulating about a future set Call of Duty in store for this years annual release, coming from franchise stalwart Infinity Ward. It seems these two series are going to be endlessly circling one another for as long as the video game medium exists, aren't they?

In any case, I can see how news of a "future set" Call of Duty game isn't as exciting as a future set Battlefield one -- after all, a futuristic setting has been par for the course for this series since Black Ops II, with every game since seemingly competing for the previous one with how deep into the future it can take things. I mean hell, the last game took place in the year 2065, and featured robots. You can't go much farther from "infantry on the ground during World War II" then that.

...is what I'm assuming Treyarch told Infinity Ward before they began developing this game, with a solid "Challenge accepted" bringing us to where we could be now: a space set, "full on sci-fi" Call of Duty installment. That's at least according to NeoGaf user Shinobi602, a noted industry insider who also predicted what would feature in Black Ops III months before the game was officially unveiled. Shinobi's story was later backed up by Eurogamer, who also heard that the game would not be a sequel to their last game, Call of Duty: Ghosts. Considering that not a single person in the whole dang world cares about that series, it's probably for the best that Ghosts was a one-and-done entry.

Still though, it shouldn't be a surprise that Infinity Ward is taking things into the far out future -- with over a dozen games in the franchise already, there's simply nowhere else to take the series. And with every entry seemingly going more and more into sci-fi territory, one developer was bound to go this crazy with it eventually. Whether or not such a move will turn out beneficial for the future of CoD though is anyone's guess -- is this the moment Call of Duty jumps the shark? Or with a franchise this limitless, is that even possible?

In any case, I doubt it will take long for us to know for sure what this 2016 Call of Duty game will bring -- history tells us that the official announcement of the game will land in May (probably during some basketball game or something), with a full reveal coming during Sony's E3 press conference in June. In the meantime, let's just guess what this crazy game will be called. Space Warfare? Galactic Warfare? STAR WARS..fare? The possibilities are truly endless.