Battlefield 1 is taking us way back to the First World War, but it turns out there was a Call of Duty title in development that wanted to go much further back in time.
GamesRadar reports that Call of Duty: Roman Wars was to be set in Ancient Rome, if you can believe it.
The title would have featured first-person sword combat, and other such Roman romps.
A demo for this ‘lost’ Call of Duty game apparently impressed publisher Activision, but it transpires that a mixture of studio stubbornness and ‘fears of over-saturating the brand’ killed the project.
Fears of over-saturating Call of Duty? What a simpler time we once lived in, eh?
Anyway, the project was eventually re-purposed and pitched to Ubisoft as simply Roman Wars. A gameplay video (which you can see below) is from that pitch.
GamesRadar’s source – who chose to go by the name ‘Polemus’ – says developer Vicarious Visions was behind the prototype.
Polemus also claims that Roman Wars was created as a result of a test to see what Activision’s studios could bring from the Call of Duty name.
The project was built from the foundations of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2, and would have seen us play as a number of different characters, from pathetic grunts to none other than Julius Caesar himself.
Roman Wars would have aimed towards real accuracy, taking plenty of inspiration from historic Roman campaigns – it’s a shame we’ll never see what could have been a genuinely interesting Call of Duty.
While we mourn the loss of Roman Wars, the sci-fi inspired Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare will be coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on November 4.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.