Call of Duty Games that Never Saw the Light of Day – Essentially Sports

Activision has divided the majority of 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 when the publishing company sacked the studio in the middle of development. Other instances have also seen studios back out themselves.

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

Call of Duty: Roman Wars

Back in 2008, Activision had taken 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 prepared 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 even the ability to throw sand at enemies. It even featured battle elephants, swords, spears, etc.

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

COD: Devil’s Brigade

Devil’s Brigade was under development by the Underground Development studio. The developers 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 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.

Read: Comparision Between Black Ops Cold War and Modern Warfare Guns

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 to make one featuring the Vietnam War. However, after months of development, Activision canceled the game and moved Sledgehammer to help Infinity Ward develop Modern Warfare 3 instead. The developers also planned to make COD: Vietnam into a TPS game.

COD: Tactics

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

Call of Duty: Combined Forces

Combined Forces was going to be a sequel to COD: Finest Hour, which was the first CoD for consoles. Spark Unlimited had pitched the idea of Combined Forces to Activision after completing Finest Hour.

While pitching the idea, Spark had asked for funding of $10.5 million for a game which was only going to be an expansion pack to the prequel. The studio initially had a budget of $w million for Finest Hour, but it had increased to $8 million following a lawsuit by EA against Activision in 2003. Furthermore, it also included other production expenses. 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.