Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Was Teased in Call of Duty: Ghosts

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Call of Duty: Ghosts are now linked via a small Easter egg in one of Ghosts' multiplayer maps.

If you've been keeping up with Ghosts' DLC, you can check it out right now. In a small office in the northern part of the Showtime map included in the game's fourth and last Nemesis DLC, there's a poster on the wall for the “Guilin Bai Lan Resort.” This is the same location as a recently revealed multiplayer map in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare set in China, Retreat.

The image above is taken from IGN's tour of Advanced Warfare's Retreat map, and the image below (via MP1ST) shows the poster from Ghosts' Showtime map. As you can clearly see, the poster doesn't only include the same building and backdrop, but the two also share the resort's name and logo.

Could Sledgehammer Games' Advanced Warfare be set in the same universe as Infinity Ward's Ghosts? We won't know for sure until we learn more about the Advanced Warfare's plot. It could easily be just a fun inside joke between the two developers, with Infinity Ward adding the poster to the DLC before it was released in early August, which is well after the Advanced Warfare reveal in May. But the games' plots and timelines make it possible.

Ghosts, which is set in an alternate timeline from the Modern Warfare games, starts in 2017, in a world where both the Middle East and the United States suffer devastating attacks. Advanced Warfare's plot starts in 2054, where the world turns to private military corporations after a terrorist organization carries out a global attack.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare launches November 4 for Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PC--but not Wii U.