"We wanted to try and capture that same feeling in this game."
Remember how you felt, the first time you played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare? The game that - well, "closed the book on World War 2 shooters" is probably too strong, but it certainly turned the page. Or doodled chinooks and F16s in the margins. Whatever. Sledgehammer wants you to feel the same way about Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the first Call of Duty in recent history to be developed in three years rather than two.

"We looked back at the history of Call of Duty, and I don't know if you remember when Modern Warfare came out, for those of us in the industry who weren't at Activision at the time, it really blew us away," studio co-founder Glen Schofield told OXM in an interview, which forms part of a positively humongous Advanced Warfare preview in our latest issue.

"To us it really ushered in a new era of Call of Duty," he went on. "It puts you in the shoes of a Tier 1 soldier, in the Middle East - it was realistic, the sound, the audio, the look of it was just unbelievable. We wanted to try and capture that same feeling in this game."

Co-founder Michael Condrey concurred. "This truly is a new era of Call of Duty for generation eight," he said. "And we're excited about that, we're really trying to usher in something pretty special here.

"The full three years gave us the time to develop the technology, to focus on the creative, to do the research, to really maximise the experience, and again to push this new generation, to get every last ounce of horsepower out of it, and not to be in any way constrained by tech or in terms of ideas, by the previous generation of hardware."

Advanced Warfare's claim to fame takes the form of a fancy new Exosuit, which can be upgraded in the course of the campaign and allows you to perform dash moves, double jumps and the like. This theoretically makes the new Call of Duty a much more tactical, Crysis-style experience in single player; Sledgehammer has yet to say much about the suit's presence in multiplayer, but it sounds like the ramifications will be dramatic.

Read my site preview for a taste of the magazine piece, which is based on hands-off playtime with three campaign levels. According to Condrey, Advanced Warfare has a higher resolution than last year's Call of Duty: Ghosts on Xbox One.