With the recent news that Activision's popular Call of Duty series is now moving into a three-year development cycle between three developers, Activision’s Eric Hirshberg has revealed this year's Sledgehammer game will be developed primarily for next-gen consoles.

Speaking in an interview with IGN, Hirshberg shed some light on how Sledgehammer is handling the development of the next Call of Duty, stating that their Call of Duty will be focused on "next-gen-first development."

“Sledgehammer is approaching this as a next-gen-first development,” says Hirshberg. “Obviously in the console-transition year, anyone who developed a cross-generational game last year had to deal with the fact that the technology of the next-gen platforms was still coming into focus and changing quite a bit during the development process. Now that we have the next-gen hardware out in the marketplace and solid, that is our primary development.”

This move from the previous two-year cycle that saw main developers Infinity Ward and Treyarch handling the series should hopefully bring in some fresh ideas for the series, which has stuck primarily to modern combat setting since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007. According to Hirshberg, this increase in development time should allow for new ideas to flourish, and less stress on the development team in getting the game out of the door.

“On the two-year cycle, with the level of content we were putting in the games, it became a real horse race each and every time to get everything done that we wanted to get done. With next-gen hardware, Hirshberg coninues, “we’ve got more capabilities than ever before to play with and we want to make sure our developers have the time to innovate, iterate, to bring the best creative vision and the most possible polish to each and every game.”