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Time is littered with the ghosts of video games that never quite managed to come to life. One of these is Call of Duty: Fog of War, a third-person Vietnam shooter filled with dread and horror. While we already knew about the game, in a new interview, Glen Schofield explains some of the set pieces he was working on.
"We wanted to make a scary version of Vietnam," Schofield tells our friends at PC Gamer. He was one of the core designers of Dead Space, so he has a solid horror pedigree.
"And not just scary, we wanted intense battles that were personal, but stuff you've never seen before," he continues. "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."
Call of Duty: Black Ops features several missions in Vietnam, and some even have you fighting in tunnels, but I'd be curious to see what a more horror-focused vibe looked like – what we got was more action-packed.
"There's another sequence where you get to a river," Schofield says, "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? And 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."
Remember this is all in third-person, so this would play out more like an Uncharted set piece than your typical Call of Duty fare.
"[The character] looks behind him and sees it’s coming down," Schofield continues. "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."
I like the idea of a plane playing hide and seek. Only instead of looking for it behind a sofa, you're running for your life and jumping off of waterfalls. Now that's Call of Duty. Instead of that, though, Sledgehammer, the studio Schofield co-founded, was moved to Modern Warfare 3 due to internal issues at Activision.
Oh what could have been.
In the meantime, check out the best Call of Duty games ever made. Do any sound as good as what Schofield envisioned for Fog of War?
