Call of Duty 3 was rushed. 5 has development three times as long.

[LordTheNightKnight]

Call of Duty 3 Needed More Time For Greatness

Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4 was fantastic. Treyarch's CoD3 wasn't as fantastic. Granted, it was pretty good! But honestly, not as good as Infinity Ward's CoD2. (See where this is going?) Says CoD5 senior producer Noah Heller:

I'd say that one of the things that's hard for a player to understand, I'm sure you guys can understand it because you have a lot more insight into the industry, is that Call of Duty 3 was about eight months end to end for development... And it's very hard to make a great game in that time. Call of Duty 3 is a very good game. It sold very well so a lot of people must have liked it... But it's not the game this team could have made if it had the time to polish to the level they needed to... Look at the great games of just this last six months or year. Look at Modern Warfare, look at BioShock, look at GTA 4. What these games have in common is enough time to polish and iterate on it, and I think as an industry we're learning how important that is... I feel like it's a little bit of an underdog story almost. Here's a team that's never had a chance to actually make a game with this much time. Modern Warfare comes along and raises the bar really high and now the team says, we've got to show what we've got, we've got to show up with a great game or else the players aren't going to want to play it. Expectations are so high.

They are, they really are. Treyarch was given a two year development cycle for CoD5, so hopefully that extra time in the oven will pay off. Willing to give World War II another spin if the game dazzles.

World at War First Look [Videogamer]