Never-Before-Seen Canceled Call Of Duty Game Surfaces In Leaked Video With Gameplay Footage

Never-before-seen footage of an ultimately canceled Call of Duty game has emerged online, providing a glimpse at what was planned, at one stage at least, to be Call of Duty’s first major jump into sci-fi and outer space. Footage from a “Future Warfare” game codenamed NXI was posted online recently.

Brian Bright, a video game industry veteran who worked on the game, confirmed NX1 was made after Infinity Ward “imploded,” so that would have been around 2010. Neversoft, previously known for its Tony Hawk games, was making this game after pivoting from its work on the Guitar Hero series. The aim, Bright said, was to make a “futuristic Call of Duty game.”

In the leaked campaign footage, we see a mission to the moon. The footage emerged from a test, Bright suggested. “This mission was on the moon, some experiments with low g and was really about the team learning the engine,” he said. “We were making GH games on our THPS engine prior.”

Bright was the multiplayer lead on Future Warfare. He said this game would have been “in place of” Call of Duty: Ghosts, which released in 2013 from Infinity Ward.

“We had 2-3 campaign missions, and a bunch of MP work done (I was MP lead on this) before cancellation,” Bright said. “One thing we really liked in MP was the first Escort mode in COD. There is footage out there on this.”

The Escort mode, Bright said, involved teams pushing an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) through a map’s checkpoints. Presumably one side attempted to attack it while the other tried to destroy it. The UGV had a trophy system attached to it to automatically destroy nearby explosives.

Work-in-progress footage of NX1’s multiplayer mode has leaked, too, showing futuristic weapons in action. As Bright said, multiplayer was not finished–and the game was ultimately canceled–which helps explain why the footage does not look like a game that’s ready for release.

In 2010, it came to light that Activision registered domains for Call of Duty: Future Warfare, as well as Space Warfare, Secret Warfare, and Advanced Warfare. Of these, only Advanced Warfare (2014) would go to become a real product.

Looking ahead, Activision has Call of Duty’s product roadmap outlined through 2027. The company was recently acquired by Microsoft, which recently laid off 1,900 people within the Xbox gaming division. Call of Duty developers around the world were among those impacted.