“This time around, we’ve really focused on telling a very compelling story with very compelling characters.”

That’s Sledgegammer Games’ Creative Director, Bret Robbins on the studio’s three-year journey to develop the story for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, out this holiday season for current and next gen consoles. In this two minute look at the development of story for the futuristic shooter, which features a performance captured Kevin Spacey as the heavy.

Also: powered exoskeletons.

During E3, the Robbins was on hand to chat with Malik about crafting the story and how Spacey’s involvement influenced the narrative set 40 years in the future that Sledgehammer was crafting.

Robbins says that this time around – in a series first – Advanced Warfare will focus on a single protagonist, rather than jumping between multiple characters across the game’s conflict. Mitchell – the hero of Advanced Warfare – will have a journey that spans 8 years, taking us from his beginnings as a soldier to status as a hardened vet.

I’ll admit that in previous games, the jumps across characters (and continents) could make the narrative a little difficult (or downright impossible) to track. Black Ops II, from fellow Activision studio, Treyarch, had possibly the series’ best and most interestingly executed narrative, jumping back and forth between the ’80s and the present while offering stealthily integrated story branches which would affect the outcome of the overall story. That game’s story was by Man of Steel writer David Goyer, and while its script features his usual tics (villains gets caught intentionally, lots of intentional mayhem for its own sake), it offered up plenty of mystery and weirdness that has me hoping we’ll get a Black Ops III.