Remember when people were getting tired of seeing the same Call of Duty games churned out year after year? You know, around 2013-ish after Call of Duty: Ghosts. It sounds like Activision had the option to produce a brand new Call of Duty game, a game like we’ve never played before – Roman Wars. GamesRadar have produced a great feature piece about the unreleased game.
Created by Vicarious Visions, Roman Wars contained a mix of first and third person action. Of course, there weren’t any guns back then meaning you’d have to use a sword in first person. Apparently Activision liked the idea and the demo enough for it to be brought to CEO Bobby Kotick’s desk for the final seal of approval. Unfortunately, Activision decided against it, citing fears of over-saturating the brand.
“I really thought an ancient warfare game would do well, re-skinned with the Call of Duty engine,” says Polemus to GamesRadar. (this isn’t actually the speaker’s name, it’s a pseudonym). “Basically we were following Julius Caesar’s Tenth Legion – his special forces during those times - and we were doing a one level prototype based on the Battle of Alesia. So we built the one mission based on that. We had everything from riding horses, to riding an elephant, to working with catapults. All done in the Unreal Engine for rapid prototyping”.
Though the game was demoed on an Xbox 360, the timing of the game’s launch could’ve seen it released as a next generation launch title (that would be our current generation now). As with all Call of Duty games, it would’ve been available on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
“They sent it up to Activision, to Bobby Kotick, and they wanted to hear a little bit more about the backstory,” Polemus told GamesRadar. But while it was received well there was some uncertainty about using Call of Duty’s branding. “I at the time was being sort of… I was being stiff in that area,” they admit. “I was huge on Call of Duty myself so I was like ‘I really want to keep it on the Call of Duty level.’ And they said, ‘that’s not going to fly with Activision – they’re already looking at a different version and they don’t want to oversaturate the market’”.
Click here to read the feature by Leon Hurley at GamesRadar. You can also watch some of the unreleased footage below.
