When the reveal trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 dropped, it looked like a really engaging sci-fi psychological thriller… up until the point we learned it was a Call of Duty game. Not to say that it won’t still be an interesting campaign, to say the least, but the FPS combat mega franchise seems to be straying further and further from their roots as a historical fiction warfare series. Sure, we’ve seen them jump the shark on more than one occasion with the inclusion of robots, rocket boosters, and even low-gravity space combat, but this really seems to be the final nail in the coffin… or the cherry on top, depending on your preferences.
I for one am a major fan of horror titles, psychological or otherwise, and don’t mind the new tone, though I find that it would make far more sense if the developers would just title it something other than Call of Duty. They should separate the more experimental titles as spinoffs and keep the mainline series focused, though I don’t believe for a second that they’d drop the multi-billion-dollar name for fear of losing revenue from some of the less keyed-in gamers who really only buy Call of Duty games. Either way, the direction the series is going isn’t really new for the franchise, as years ago while working at Sledgehammer, Dead Space‘s Glen Schofield was working on a title called Call of Duty: Fog of War.
Now, this title was planned as a third-person Call of Duty that Schofield shared he, “wanted to make a scary version of Vietnam.” Vietnam was already scary enough during the conflict what with the guerilla warfare, primitive booby traps, tunnel rats, and Agent Orange seeping into everyone, but Schofield thought he could add an even darker edge to the terrible tragedies that befell all involved. The canceled project promised overwhelming high-intensity fire fights and elements akin to the horror found in Dead Space.
“We were making it, and we were really psyched about having you go through tunnels, and everything is scary because there’s not much light down there. Sometimes you’re shooting in the dark.” Schofield explained, describing on particular scene that the devs wanted to include in the final product that established the grim and pulse-pounding tone the team had in mind:
“There’s another sequence where you get to a river, and you just decide you have to follow the river down. I think you’re trying to get away, and we turned the camera, so now you’re running towards it, right? The camera’s moving with you, but what we do is, in the background of the jungle, we see this giant American bomber, the B-52, on fire. [The character] looks behind him and sees it’s coming down, and it looks like it’s coming down close, but you see it dip down behind the trees. It’s disappeared, and you’re waiting for the explosion. It doesn’t happen, and now it is coming towards you. Then you jump, and we turn the camera off this cliff, into the waterfall and the water below. You’re looking up now, so you’re diving backwards, and you see the plane go over your head, dropping pieces into the water, and then crash. It was good.”
Frankly, I would have loved playing a game like this, and honestly, I believe it would fit in the Call of Duty universe much better than the upcoming entry, but we’d have to get our hands on it to decide that ourselves. Call of Duty: Fog of War was canceled in favor of Modern Warfare 3, but it would have been interesting to see where the franchise would be now if they’d put out Schofield’s idea instead.
Maybe in an alternate timeline there are gamers exorcising ghosts in the new Call of Duty: Phantom Protocol or something… like Call of Duty Ghosts with actual ghosts. Regardless, we have a pretty fair chance at an interesting psychological thriller COD, but trailers can be deceiving. I like Remedy Entertainment games and BO7 sure looks like a new Control meets Alan Wake if they were FPS. I’ll remain cautiously optimistic. At least they won’t be carrying forward silly costumes!
