The forthcoming edition of Activision's first-person shooter game Call Of Duty was announced Tuesday night through a trailer during the NBA Playoff final.

Titled, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, the game is the sequel to Call of Duty: Black Ops that was released in November 2010. Black Ops 2 is set in 2025 and centers on the enemy taking control of the US army's unmanned weapon systems.

The narrative focuses on a new Cold War between the U.S. and China. The two countries fight it out over access to rare earth minerals needed to develop modern technological necessities like mobile phones, The Inquirer explained.

Although the game debuted Tuesday night, this was not the first time when fans got a glimpse of it. Earlier that day, images of the game were accidently leaked by the UK Activision website. However, the leaked images were removed from the site later on.

Developed by Activision's Treyarch studio, the next installment of Call Of Duty, franchise will be released later this year Nov. 13. It will compete with Bungie's Halo 4, which is being developed for Microsoft's Xbox 360.

Halo 4, the science fiction first-person shooter, will launch a new trilogy a week earlier, BBC News reported.

The decision to move Black Ops forward in time is a response to market saturation - there is an abundance of military shooters around - and a way to reinvigorate the genre, BBC News quoted games writer Danie Krupa as saying.

But it isn't a strikingly original move. Ubisoft's long-running Ghost Recon series is also making a leap forward in time this year. Halo is a military shooter set in the distant future, Krupa added.

With the last iteration - Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - reaching the billion dollar mark in just 16 days, the franchise has continued to break its own records in terms of sales. In December last year, Activision reportedly announced via a press release that its Modern Warfare 3 video game reached the $1 billion mark in just 16 days, three days earlier than the 2009 hit movie Avatar, which achieved the same record in 19 days.

Click here for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 interactive trailer.

RELATED STORIES
China Rare earth China