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Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare confirmed with Kevin Spacey and hover-bikes

Adam Rosenberg
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The 2014 update to the Call of Duty franchise will be called Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare; the first trailer is out right now and the game itself will come out on November 4, 2014. No mention of platform availability (“all of them” is a safe bet), but the trailer is made up entirely of Xbox One footage.

Related: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare review

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Sledgehammer Games’ first effort in the series as the sole lead developer — previously, the team worked alongside Infinity Ward on Modern Warfare 3 — seems to focus on future conflicts in a world where enhanced soldiers, hover-bikes, and Kevin Spacey overseeing private military forces are all a thing.

See here:

That looks an awful lot like House of Cards star and all-around bad-ass Kevin Spacey, right? That’s because it is. Spacey appears to be the campaign’s Big Bad, the top dog at a major private military operation who, for reasons that aren’t yet clear, declares a beef with the U.S. government.

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You’re probably wondering at this point exactly why you’re seeing a trailer for a game that wasn’t supposed to be revealed until Sunday. It all started when Variety took a listen to an audio clip of Spacey reading the line, “And you think you can just march into these countries based on some fundamentalist religious principles, drop a few bombs, topple a dictator and start a democracy? Give me a break.” That’s from the trailer, and it popped up on the Internet earlier this week.

The sharp folks at Variety claim to have run the audio through a “sonic visualizer,” which spit out a blurry picture of a man “looking like Spacey, holding a military weapon” — yeah, we know, but take a look yourself at the source link. Nothing definitively Call of Duty there, but the audio clip suddenly made a whole lot more sense when Activision’s official Call of Duty Twitter feed tweeted out this teasing video:

#ANewEra of Call of Duty arrives May 4th. http://t.co/h8dvBN5sTW

— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) May 2, 2014

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when our friends over at Destructoid got a hold of leaked media, including the now-official trailer you see above, and a rough synopsis of the story (again, as laid out in the official trailer). Activision issued the official trailer in the early morning hours today.

The countdown timer for Sunday’s reveal is still up on CallofDuty.com, so it’s not yet clear if the trailer is the only thing that was set for Sunday’s reveal. We’ll be checking in with Activision PR today for clarification, and will update this post accordingly when we hear back; seems like they probably had a late night.

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Adam Rosenberg
Adam Rosenberg
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Previously, Adam worked in the games press as a freelance writer and critic for a range of outlets, including Digital Trends…
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