It’s that time of year again: Call Of Duty announcement season is upon us and we’re going to tell you about it, just like every other website, magazine, homeless-man-with-a-sign, and carrier pigeon in the world. We’ve pondered how to tell you about it in interesting ways, like using theives cant, but we were worried we’d be misunderstood and thought to have gone insane. So here it is plain and simple:

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 is a thing that is happening, we know this because the heat death of the universe is an inevitability and also because we got a press release for it.

Right, now we’ve had some fun with it, we’ll be serious for a bit and tell you that the above trailer is pretty much the only info available at the moment, thanks to the “community reveal” not happening until 17 May 2018. BlOps4 is releasing earlier than the usual Call Of Duty game though, 12 October 2018 so you’re going to have to break open the piggy bank a month early this year.

Now time for some semi-speculation based on what we can see in the trailer. Early on there’s a shot of an eye and some numbers, which is presumably Mason. We then cut to some shaky shots of a 1970’s style CIA document, heavily redacted, showing “24 Hours TO FIRST STRIKE” (capitalisation theirs, laughter ours) and then cuts to a map showing circled east-coast cities in the US and the only bit of pertinent information that jumps out of the block of blurry text on the left is “U.S.S.R”. Lump in the following DEFCON 2 image and you’ve got a pretty solid grounds to assume that the plot for the past segment of the game is going to revolve around stopping a Russian missile strike against the US. Job done. There’s also a bluescale bit later on showing Mason smashing Kravchenko through a window from the original Black Ops and what looks like the back of Menendez from Black Ops 2.

The future segments are a bit harder to decypher: There’s a brief shot of what looks like Kane from Command and Conquer with a porn star ‘stache and then we’ve got a bit of a remote controlled car drone that explodes on a structure that looks like it might be a Russian arctic base (this speculation based off of the ice on the railings and two soldiers with Russian weaponry which magically vanishes at the moment the drone explodes). Next future bit we see is several seconds later when a machine-gun equipped quadcopter drone is flying over a container yard in what may be Hong Kong (judging by the buildings in the background). Cut to a first-person drone segment showing destroyed cars and a Red Baron company logo which, given Call Of Duty‘s subtlety, couldn’t possibly be Germany (the markings on a vehicle roof as well as it’s colour may indicate it’s a North American or Canadian police car.)

There’s also a few shots we can’t place in the timeline because of their out-of-context nature – they could be multi-player or story mode for all we know: a prison cell building interior, about three dozen shots of men with guns, and three jets. There’s a bit about the inevitable zombie mode showing Nazi uniformed zombies interspersed too but we’ve never heard of anyone caring about that mode so we’ll leave it at that.

Stay tuned for the 17 May community reveal when we’re 100% certain TreyArch will reveal it to be a sedate game about being a cheese merchant in 1700’s France.