It looks like Activision has released a tad early the teaser trailers for the third game in their wildly popular Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series of first-person action shooter. Leaks began to appear about Modern Warfare 3 days prior to the release of these simple teaser trailers. With EA and DICE already months ahead of showing the public and game journalists peeks into their much-anticipated Battlefield 3 the ball was now in Activision’s court to respond.

The Modern Warfare fan-base continue to remain loyal to the series, but already there’s been chinks in the series’ armor as the previous entry in the game saw the head of it’s development studio, Infinity Ward, fired from Activision then followed by nearly half of the lead programmers and designers of the Modern Warfare franchise. This showed a weakness in Activision’s biggest franchise outside of World of Warcraft (which I still think more a Blizzard game than Activision). EA and DICE had an ok attempt to knock off Activision from the modern combat FPS genre with Battlefield 2, but it wasn’t enough. It looks like Battlefield 3 may be the one title that could do the job.

Modern Warfare 3 will be set right after the cliffhanger of the previous game and take players through battlefields in 15 cities around the world (the US, France, England and Germany being some of them). Just like Battlefield 3, this game will have fully destructible environments and a much more expansive gameplay map. Players will return to controlling vehicles (though Activision doesn’t specify if they’ll be on-the-rails vehicle controls or fully-controllable vehicles like those for Battlefield 3) like the AC-130 gunship and an M-1A2 main battle tank.

It would be foolish of anyone to say this game will tank. This game could be just a massive rehash of the previous two game with updated graphics like it’s new Black Ops sibling, but with the tens of millions of fans worldwide it will still sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of units. The question now is whether the strong push from EA and DICE with their retooled Battlefield 3 will be the needed kick in Activision’s collective pants to improve on their signature franchise instead of just sitting pat and hoping brand-name recognition makes them tons of money again.

Modern Warfare 3 is set to have it’s worldwide release on November 8, 2011.