Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and Real Weapons Development

No. you didn't misread that title – this isn't just about video games. Many of the uber-futuristic weapons depicted in this and other popular shoot-em-ups are closer to reality than you think. Most of the time visionary books, movies, and games get most things hilariously wrong but every so often real predictions are made.

The makers of COD: Advanced Warfare, Sledgehammer Games, studied and examined developing technologies, contacted sources, consulted augers and oracles and maybe threw some chicken bones.  No, you aren't going to be able to go to a local gun show and buy the fictional EPM3 energy weapon or  MORS rail gun quite just yet, but there are some glimmers of truth, as a recent article shows. The author, Pierre Bienaimé of Business Insider, is known for his military-centric articles.
Here is a salient piece of his article:

“Because the experience would be pushing people's boundaries of what is believable, we wanted to show that the research was real,” said Michael Condrey, co-founder and studio head at Sledgehammer.

It became a hard fast rule that if the team couldn't point to R&D, prototypes, or at least concepts for their fictional weapons, the creators wouldn't let it into the game. Their sources included The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an R&D group based out of West Point, university researchers, and even arms vendors.

A popular basic weapon in the game is the TAC-19, a directed-energy, pump-action shotgun that shoots a concussive pulse and is highly effective at short range.

Directed-energy weapons are a category that is getting lots of research right now.

“We know today that they're using compressed sound, compressed air, lots of non-lethal forms of directed energy,” Condrey said.

The long range acoustic device, or LRAD, has already been used at least once to deter advancing pirates off the coast of Somalia. The weapon, commissioned after Al Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, can cause permanent damage to the hearing of its targets more than 300 yards away.

Granted, the LRAD doesn't harness sound in a ballistic capacity, but a starting investment (and a working weapon) in sonic energy was enough to justify speculation by the game developers. In fact, said Condrey, they feel they've been a bit conservative with their guesswork.

“Our game is 2054, it's 40 years out. These things are way, way closer than that,” he said.
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They go on to cover railguns, 3D printing of weapons, hover bikes, and more. Read the article in its entirety here.