Call of Duty Games that Never Saw the Light of Day

Published 09/21/2020, 12:52 PM EDT

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Activision have divided most Call of Duty titles under three franchises, namely World War, Modern Warfare, and Black Ops. They have released new titles annually for the last 15 years. Although, Activision have also released a few standalone titles, unrelated to other storylines.

Unfortunately, there have been many instances where some titles never made it out of development because of various reasons.

Here, we take a look at some CoD titles that Activision canceled.

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Call of Duty: Roman Wars

Back in 2008, Activision took a different route than their usual games and had planned to feature medieval warfare in a title. Activision had given the responsibility of this game to Vicarious Visions studio. Vicarious Visions had even produced a demo version of the game, featuring first-person and third-person combat.

The game had other medieval features such as sword and shield parry combat, horse riding, a speech from Julius Caesar, and the ability to throw sand at enemies. It even featured battle elephants, swords, spears, etc.

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While the executives at Activision were happy with the demo, they decided it didn’t fit into the whole Call of Duty theme. Therefore, they halted the production of Roman Wars.

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COD: Devil’s Brigade

Devil’s Brigade had been under development by the Underground Development studio. The developers had aimed at making a game for the Xbox 360, which would focus on the Italian campaign in World War II. A visual artist named Terry Allen has revealed short footage of the game along with a few screenshots.

The game would’ve been the only third-person shooter under the CoD franchise. However, for reasons unknown, Activision decided not to go ahead with it.

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Call of Duty: Vietnam

This game was under development for eight months by Sledgehammer Games. The developers had worked on various Call of Duty titles before and were given the task of making one that featured the Vietnam War. The developers had planned to make COD: Vietnam into a TPS game.

After months of development, however, Activision scrapped the game and moved Sledgehammer to help Infinity Ward develop Modern Warfare 3 instead.

COD: Tactics

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CoD: Tactics was going to be a strategy game. Activision had charged Vicarious Visions of the responsibility of developing it. There only exists short gameplay footage of Tactics and while no one can imagine a strategy game from Call of Duty, the footage looks promising.

Call of Duty: Combined Forces

Combined Forces was to be a sequel to CoD: Finest Hour, which was the first Call of Duty for consoles. Spark Unlimited had pitched the idea of Combined Forces to Activision after completing Finest Hour, asking for funding of $10.5 million.

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For the Finest Hour, the studio initially had a budget of just $2 million. However, that increased to $8 million following a lawsuit by EA against Activision in 2003. Therefore, Activision rejected the proposal for Combined Forces. Additionally, they also canceled their contract with Spark Unlimited.

A YouTube channel called MrDalekJD has uploaded footage of many of these games.

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Written by:

Shwetang Parthsarthy

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Shwetang Parthsarthy is an eSports author at EssentiallySports. His love for arguments and games has led him down two paths: being a law student and writing about the world of gaming since 2017. What started as a teenage hobby in the relatively small mobile gaming world with FPS games like Critical Ops and Call of Duty: Mobile, has grown into a professional pursuit with EssentiallySports.
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