Leaked ‘NX1' gameplay reveals scrapped Call of Duty set in the future
The futuristic era of Call of Duty is now fondly reminisced, as titles like Black Ops 3 and Advanced Warfare were grossly misjudged upon release as boots left the ground for the first time.
Having now turned into a distant memory of high-octane true-arcade CoD, it has now been leaked that the futuristic era could have actually been birthed quite a few years earlier.
Leaked content, verified by developers, has emerged of a Call of Duty game named "NXI", which was developed by Neversoft and was meant to be released instead of Ghosts.
Ex-Call of Duty devs verify leaked NX1 game
Over a decade ago now, Neversoft, the developers behind Tony Hawk's (1999-2007), Spider-Man (2000), and Guitar Hero (2007-10), were set to be the lead studio on one of their own instalments into the Call of Duty universe. A decade later, it has now been confirmed as a futuristic title featuring content on the moon.
A leaked 10-minute video of the campaign has now made the rounds on Twitter (X), as well as a further two-minute snippet of multiplayer.
"This was NX1, after [Infinity Ward] imploded and split into Respawn Neversoft pivoted from Guitar Hero to make a futuristic COD game," confirmed ex-Call of Duty developer Brian Bright.
This game was reportedly set to release in 2013, which would have seen Ghosts be left behind. There are also many similarities between the two games, gravity levels aside, as many Ghosts guns are named after NX1, the campaign had the same protagonists' names, and the UI is almost identical.
"This mission was on the moon, some experiments with low g and was really about the team learning the engine," Bright added.
According to Bright, a Lead Developer on the Multiplayer side of the game for this project, the un-released title had three missions for Campaign completed, and "a bunch" of multiplayer done, including guns, maps, and game modes.
Call of Duty's cancelled project had some questionable maps
From the multiplayer leaks, players have now found a list of multiplayer maps which were set to come too. Included in said list was "Bin Laden's Compound" among the likes of Crash, Outpost, Overgrown, Afghan, and Terminal, which were all set to be remastered.
In a separate thread, Bright continued to validate these leaks, saying, "This map list was from early on in mp dev on NX1. Most of these are test maps, we had 4 or so maps that were fleshed out in the standard modes and 2 we played Escort modes in."
Escort would have been a mode similar to that seen in Overwatch and XDefiant Beta where players needed to guard an objective and march it through territory, similar to how War works in Modern Warfare 3.
Given that Ghosts has been found to have been the least-popular title in that era, maybe this was a missed opportunity from Activision, who knows how the futuristic era would have settled in after this...
