More than a few Call of Duty players have longed for a return to the franchise's historical roots, but few fans could have ever expected to learn that there were plans for the series to go back in time by thousands of years.
That is, however, exactly what happened. Though the game would obviously never become a finished product, a Call of Duty spin-off taking place during Roman times was being seriously considered back in 2008. It was called Call of Duty: Roman Wars, and as detailed by GamesRadar, it actually sounded pretty cool.
As the story goes, Activision sought pitches from its various studios in regard to new directions for the Call of Duty franchise. One of those ideas came from developer Vicarious Visions, the studio now largely responsible for the Skylanders franchise. The studio proposed an ancient warfare spin-off of Call of Duty that would have players battling with swords, bows, spears and more in both first-person and third-person. Players would be able to use siege engines like trebuchets and ballista, while also riding various animals like horses and even elephants into battle.
Much like older games in the Call of Duty series, the game would have had players step into the shoes of various soldiers in Julius Caesar's 10th Legion, described in the video as "the spec ops of its day." A small internal team worked on a prototype for the title and sought to mimic the action of films like 300 and Gladiator. From the footage shown in the GamesRadar video, most of the action appears to be in third-person, though the game's gladiator arena combat would take place from a first-person perspective and is said to have used a melee combat system similar to that of the Condemned series of first-person survival horror games.
Though it sounds like Activision initially took a liking to the title, concerns revolving around attaching the Call of Duty name to the game began to arise. It seems disagreements surrounding whether or not to associate the game with Call of Duty may have played a role in the project's termination.
A Call of Duty game set in Roman times sounds weird, but it's no stranger than many of the recent additions to the Call of Duty franchise. A zombies mode appears in nearly every new Call of Duty game, and the new DLC for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 even includes dragons. The franchise has long left realism and historical accuracy behind, so a game revolving around ancient warfare might not have even been all that out of place.
Ultimately, it was probably for the best that work didn't continue on the game. A rough release window for Call of Duty: Roman Wars put it to release around 2013 as a likely PlayStation 4 and Xbox One launch title, but as it turns out, the Xbox One already had a third-person Roman action game in the form of Ryse: Son of Rome (as seen in the header image above). The two games would have been incredibly similar in nature, and it seems likely that neither one would have found success if both of them had released around the same time.
