A mysterious Activision shooting game has surfaced on the Microsoft Store. And although it doesn’t carry Call of Duty branding, there’s reason to believe it’s a placeholder for the next installment in the franchise.
The game, titled The Red Door, quietly landed on the Microsoft Store on Thursday. The listing says Activision developed the game, and it’ll carry an M for Mature rating at launch because of its “intense violence, blood, and language.” The listing says the game will be 81.7GB in size and launch on the Xbox One. Exactly when, however, is unknown. It also fails to mention whether it’ll be available on Xbox Series X.
“There is more than one truth,” the game’s description reads. “If you go looking for answers, be ready to question everything and accept that nothing will ever be the same. The Red Door awaits, do you dare step through it?”
Art accompanying the listing simply depicts a red keyhole with what appears to be a maze graphic inside.
While the game may be an entirely new Activision property, it could also be a placeholder for Activision’s next Call of Duty game, believed to be titled Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.
For weeks, gamers have been speculating that Activision and its development house Treyarch are inching closer to announcing the next Call of Duty installment. Those rumors were bolstered last month when Sony’s North American PlayStation Store briefly listed a new PlayStation 4 game called The Red Door. When Reddit users who discovered the listing reviewed a content ID tag, it read “COD2020INTALPHA1,” suggesting The Red Door was actually a code name for the next Call of Duty title.
Activision hasn’t been shy about dropping hints to its next game and apparent Cold War setting. In recent updates to Call of Duty: Warzone, players have discovered bunkers with inactive nukes. In some bunkers, players have picked up telephones and listened in on Russian voices communicating on the other end.
It’s unclear what The Red Door refers to and if it’ll play a part in any upcoming Call of Duty title. For now, Activision, which did not respond to a Digital Trends request for comment, seems content to drop hints about a new game without delivering concrete details.
With Microsoft’s next Xbox game showcase airing next Thursday, however, it may not be long before Activision reveals its plans.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.