Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare dev on its canceled third-person Call of Duty

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May 5, 2014

Last week, developer Sledgehammer gave us an impressive first look at its next entry in Activision’s immensely popular series, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. But that’s not the first project that Sledgehammer worked on at the publisher.

Speaking with Game Informer, Sledgehammer cofounders Michael Condrey and Glen Schofield talked about their canceled third-person Call of Duty game.

They started the project after leaving Visceral Games (where they worked on Dead Space) but stopped development in order to help finish Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. This was right after Activision fired Infinity Ward’s Vince Zampella and Jason West, who took several of Infinity Ward’s developers with them to work on Titanfall at Respawn Entertainment.

At the time, Schofield said it wasn’t likely Sledgehammer would return to the third-person game because its setting was too obscure. Today, we learned that it was supposed to take place in the Vietnam War, focusing on the “Secret War” in Cambodia and Laos.

“We had spent six or eight months on it, and were really getting into the story,” Schofield told Game Informer. “We had some really cool mechanics. We had a big moment that I would love to get into a game someday, but it's not something we could do in first-person.”

He added that large sections of the game took place in underground tunnels, and that the team was “going for some Dead Space moments.”

Sledgehammer had 15 fully playable minutes of the game before it moved on to Modern Warfare 3, and it says the decision to drop the project wasn’t easy. "It was part of our culture that we were all gonna make that decision together. We would have loved to make that [third-person] game. It was in a space that we enjoyed, but how does anything compare to the first-person blockbuster release of 2011?"

Sledgehammer’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare launches November 4. For more, be sure to read GameSpot's previous coverage.