Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 To Be Set In The Future?

Yesterday we revealed a filtered version of a mysterious image from the official Call of Duty site, which appeared to show a Quadrotor machine-gun mounted drone, casting doubt on the upcoming project being a sequel to Black Ops thanks to the decidedly futuristic feel of the technology. But that is not the only possibility: those who are suggesting that the tech is too far at odds with the setting of the original Treyarch-helmed shooter are thinking in too linear terms. Who's to say that the second Black Ops game might not merely cast of the Cold War setting of the first, and jump forward in the timeline to a near future setting? Who's to say the game might not establish a completely new base of characters, injecting fresh intrigue in contrast to the stuttering stagnation of the Modern Warfare series? And who is to say the multi-strand narrative style that Call of Duty games tend to favour won't include historical settings from different points on the timeline - one past, one future? These are of course no more than statements of speculation, but so too are those which suggest Black Ops 2 won't be coming because of the one futuristic teaser we have been treated to so far. The slightest of evidence might exist in the project codename "Eclipse", which could hint at an entirely new Call of Duty sub-franchise, but what is more likely is that the game's release will coincide with the full solar eclipse on 13th November. I simply cannot see the Call of Duty team going for "Eclipse" as a viable sub-title for a military game: it doesn't fit the trend of other COD titles, which are completely devoid of emotion or mystique (unlike "Eclipse"), and I still see the next COD project as being Black Ops 2. And I for one would welcome a futuristic setting (though not too far advanced along the timeline), precisely because of the prospect of playing with the quadrotor drone, which looks like it will appear in the forthcoming game. As if to prove exactly what we discovered yesterday, the image that most other sites are leading with today appears below taken from the FPS Russia video we also linked, alongside the filtered version of the image we took from the Call of Duty site:

Et voila - the source of the image. As the internet slowly catches up on what we posted yesterday, and other blogs mindlessly regurgitate it without exploring the image from the site themselves, we're moving on to thinking about exactly what we might want to see from the next Call of Duty project, whether it is set in the future or otherwise. Come back to WhatCulture's gaming section to see exactly what that is in the coming days... Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is expected to be announced on 1st May and released in November.