World of Duty revealed

At a secret event earlier this week, with only a handful of specially invited game journalists, Activision Blizzard revealed who will take the reins of their flagship franchise. That it would be a MMO didn't come as a big surprise - it's been rumored for a long time and MAG, and in some ways Modern Warfare, has pushed further for this development.

What shocked us, though, was the announcement that it was Blizzard Entertainment in charge of development. The working title is World of Duty, but that's far from the final title of the game and we expect to hear a new name for it announced soon.

No pictures have been released from the game yet, we were told that we could not take any pictures at the event, but we managed to take a couple of snapshots with our iPhones - we've included them below.

The project has been in development since Activision merged with Blizzard Entertainment's former owner, Vivendi Games, and became Activision Blizzard. Blizzard have for a long time talked about their "next-gen" MMO, and it seems like it turned into World of Duty in the end. At the same time, World of Duty will be a multi-format title and is planned for release on PC/Mac, Xbox 360 and PS3. No Natal or Playstation Move-support, but if you play it on PS3 you will be able to use the Sixaxis.

Rumors at the event were that World of Duty was one of the reasons why Jason West and Vince Zampella left Infinity Ward; despite helping Blizzard with the title, they were staunch opponents to turn Call of Duty into a MMO. With them leaving Infinity Ward and Activision, Blizzard have full creative control of the project.

What we do know for certain is that the MMO will have ties to Modern Warfare - the two factions in the game will be lead by famous characters from that series. One of them is called Neo-Soviet, which is lead by Vladimir Makarov from Modern Warfare 2, while the other is an alliance between the US and the UK where Captain Price and Soap MacTavish will have prominent roles as NPCs.

Blizzard stated that the world of World of Duty will be divided into several zones, with each zone about ten times larger than the average World of Warcraft-zone. Of course, most of the game will focus on PvP, with certain zones mixing PvP with PvE. Several zones will be able to be conquered, similar to Wintergrasp in World of Warcraft, but Blizzard promised that it will be on a greater scale than Wintergrasp and that the whole setup will be a lot less mechanic than in WoW.

The game will feature instances, some of them taking the players "back in time to battles during World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam", divisions (guilds) and a whole bunch of vehicles as mounts, while helicopters won't be available from the start but are planned. Exactly when World of Duty will be released is, of course, still up in the air but except a lot more information about the game in the near future - we expect to hear a lot more about it at both E3 and at Blizzcon in October.