A great deal of time has been spent working on the story for this year’s Call of Duty game, Call of Duty: Advance Warfare–more specifically, over two-and-a-half years.

That’s according to Glen Schofield, co-founder of Advance Warfare developer Sledgehammer Games, who shared the figure on Twitter. In response to a tweet from someone who talked about this being the first Call of Duty game’s single-player he’s looked forward to, Schofield responded, “It should be. The story alone has taken over 2 1/2 years to write.”

It shouldn’t come as a major surprise that thought has been put into the story for that long. After all, the game as a whole has been in the works for almost three years and Activision has talked about wanting Call of Duty to deliver a moment on par with Game of Thrones‘ Red Wedding scene.

When it comes to creating a story, time spent writing it doesn’t necessarily equate with its level of quality. Still, from what we’ve seen so far, Advance Warfare does seem to be going in a new direction, if nothing else: It’s set in the year 2054 and focuses on the role of private military contractors. Acclaimed actor Kevin Spacey is set to play a leading role as the head of one of these PMCs–and his participation could lead to the game being seen in another of Spacey’s projects, Netflix series House of Cards.

We’re set to learn much more about Advance Warfare at E3 next month. Sledgehammer has already begun drumming up excitement for the event by claiming the game’s showing will be “incredibly special.” We’ll be able to see for ourselves about that in just over three weeks’ time, while a proper evaluation of the story will have to wait until the game is released on November 4.