Eurogamer

Activision's new UK studio will take charge of all Call of Duty games for handheld platforms, a new report suggests.

Activision Leeds will share assets from the two main Call of Duty developers Treyarch and Infinity Ward, UK industry expert Andy Payne told Videogamer.

Activision Leeds' duties will include "all handheld versions, iOS versions of Call of Duty," presumably including games for 3DS and PlayStation Vita.

Whether that includes the already-announced Vita spin-off Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified is unclear, however.

"Activision are a machine," Payne explained. "They're very good, and you know what, what people don't realise with Activision is, the two studios working on the Call of Duty franchise are collaborative studios. That's unheard of. All the assets are reusable, so they're not wasting time.

"The two studios are saying, 'I need a tank, pull it off from the library'. And those assets are also going to be starting to be used by the mobile team, which is going to be based in Leeds."

The US publisher recently set up local division Activision Leeds to work on mobile games based on its existing brands.

Activision Leeds talent includes ex-Worms studio co-founder Martyn Brown, plus members of the Rockstar Leeds, developer of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and Chinatown Wars.

The UK studio joins a huge number of development teams now working on Call of Duty titles. Treyarch and Infinity Ward are currently assisted by Raven Software and Sledgehammer. Tony Hawk studio Neversoft also recently signed on.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-06-activision-leeds-to-develop-call-of-duty-handheld-games-report

Some may view this as a bad thing "Oh no, they are putting a B Team on it!", but the silver lining here is that everything is shared between all of these studios, so it isn't like a newly started team is starting from scratch.

Sony Bend showed what can be done when you have the main teams assets at your disposal.


Let us see where this leads.

I suspect it will be four vs four online for the 3DS and eight vs eight online for the Vita.

COD on consoles is 6v6 unless you are playing Groundwar (9v9) so Vita won't be having 8v8

Wow.  It always felt like more.  I'm more of a free-for-all Death Match kind of guy, anyway. 

Yea maps are small so feels quite intense. Ground war with 9 vs 9 gets really crowded on smaller maps. 

Does rockstar leeds still exist? Anyone know if they're working on anything?

Last thing they did was the L.A. Noire PC port, they might have worked on the PC version of MP3 as well. I would say they are probably working on the PC port of GTA5 and maybe something for iOS.

... Sony bend isn't a very good comparison at all. They have been a studio for a LONG time and have made plenty of high quality games themselves. The Syphon Filter series is all down to them. In fact their two Syphon Filter PSP games are at 87 and 84% on gamerankings. While resistance retribution is at 83 and uncharted:GA at 81. So I guess sharing assets made them make worse games? 

The quality of the games have almost nothing to do with sharing assets with the main team and almost everything to do with the studio making it. If Activision leeds aren't that good then the portable versions won't be good regardless of sharing assets. If they are good then we will get good portable games.