Being the first solo Call of Duty project to come out of the studio, a lot is riding on Advanced Warfare and its developer, Sledgehammer Games, who first started out at Activision developing their own third-person Call of Duty title and later assisting Infinity Ward in the development of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

“Yeah, there is a lot of pressure,” co-founder Michael Condrey told Polygon in a recent cover story.

With record-breaking success year after year, Call of Duty fans around the world look forward to unwrapping the latest the franchise has to offer every Fall and, by this point, have some pretty high expectations.

Condrey hopes to prove that his team has what it takes to roll with the likes of Infinity Ward and Treyarch, two studios that complete the triangle which makes up Call of Duty’s now three-year development cycle and yearly release plan. One bad apple in the ongoing series, however, could spell disaster for the longevity of the franchise. As some of the more recent reports imply, we might already be seeing a decline in growth and sales.

“I was thinking about it the other day,” Condrey explained. “So like the New England Patriots. Tom Brady. The winningest Super Bowl team in the past decade. Those poor bastards, they have to win the Super Bowl every year or they’ve failed, right? … And so for us, it’s a little bit like that. … There’s some pressure with that, I won’t lie.”

“I would like to think this is the first Advanced Warfare,” he said, looking forward. Having spent the last three years forming a new idea from scratch, Condrey plans to spend the next three building something even better out of the tech and universe the studio has already established with Advanced Warfare.

According to Polygon, Condrey’s three-year plan from here on out involves upping Sledgehammer’s staff count from about 220 to 250 while moving into a new, bigger space.

If all goes according to plan, it sounds like we’ll see an ‘Advanced Warfare 2’, or something of the sort, by 2017.

For now, Sledgehammer’s pride and joy, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, launches exactly one week from today on November 3.

Here’s a “thank you” from the studio, which was just recently published on Sledgehammer’s official YouTube channel:

[youtube id=”NZJiZe0nNgw”]