This is Ground control —

New Call of Duty is the (not) first game ever to involve shooting dudes in space

Three-minute trailer has a rocking cover of "Space Oddity."

Having apparently run out of incoherently threatening foreigners to shoot here on earth, Activision and Infinity Ward's next Call of Duty game will take the wholly original angle of shooting enemies in space, a concept which we believe has never before been done in video games.

A new three-minute trailer for the previously rumored Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is heavy on the usual jump cuts and explosions amid rubble and showers of gunfire, only now some of those scenes are set in the vacuum of space (or the cold, dead light of a space station). There are a few shots of space-based combat that look more at home in a game like Elite: Dangerous than in a Call of Duty game. One shot of floating amid a ruined space station could have come right out of Adr1ft, while another scene walking through a dark corridor looks pulled directly from the Dead Space series.

The new trailer follows an earlier teaser that revealed the Settlement Defense Front, a new antagonist that promises, "You will know loss. We will be the architects of your pain. We will build monuments to your destruction."

It's unclear from the teaser and trailer if this force is made up of humans or aliens or sentient dessert toppings or some unholy alliance of all three.

The cover of "Space Oddity" that drops in partway through the trailer is pretty good.

The $80 Legacy and $100 Digital Deluxe editions of the game will also come with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, a version of the 2007 original with "vibrant current generation visuals, with fully improved texture resolution and detail, high-dynamic range lighting, lit and shadowing VFX particles, revamped animation and audio, stunning sound" for all the pixel counters out there.

The top YouTube comment on the trailer as of this writing reads "hot GARBAGE will still buy anyway." You can echo that sentiment for yourself when the game releases on November 4 on PS4, Xbox One, and Windows.

Update: Since publishing this article, we have been made aware of some previous games that involve shooting people in space. Here is what we now know to be a "comprehensive" list:

  1. Doom (PC)
  2. Combat (Atari 2600) (probably)
  3. Call of Duty: Ghosts (everything)
  4. Mass Effect 3 (dreams)

Ars "regrets" the "error."

Channel Ars Technica