Modern Warfare 3 coming just a year after Modern Warfare 2 has me worried it's gonna be an awkward year for Call of Duty

pcgamer.com:

After months of rumors and a regularly scheduled logo leak from a Doritos standee, Activision is finally ready to announce that this year's Call of Duty is Modern Warfare 3. It's releasing November 10, and a more formal reveal will happen during a Warzone event sometime soon.

Sounds like business as usual for Activision's FPS empire, except there are reasons to believe this year's Call of Duty will be anything but ordinary.

For one: this time last year, the prevailing rumor declared that Treyarch's next CoD was delayed a year, and there wouldn't be a «premium» Call of Duty game in 2023. At the time, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reported that instead of a full new game, Modern Warfare 2 would receive a second year of live service support. Activision eventually said 2023 would have a premium CoD after all, though Schreier claimed CoD 2023 would be more like a «paid expansion» to Modern Warfare 2 made by Sledgehammer Games.

«It's supposed to have lots of content! Maybe that's why they call it a 'full' release. But it's more MW2,» Schreier tweeted at the time.

Now we know that «more MW2» is coming in the form of Modern Warfare 3, and the timing couldn't be weirder. We just got Infinity Ward's rebooted Modern Warfare 2 last year, and now there's already a threequel? That simply does not happen: not since 2007 has a CoD gotten a sequel just one year later, as Activision's studios have churned out their own distinct takes on the series on a 2-3 year cycle. More recently, Activision has been splitting the work on one game across multiple studios, with one studio «leading» development. So why is Sledgehammer leading Modern Warfare 3 when it's always been Infinity Ward's series, and what exactly is Modern Warfare 3?

Right now it's a