Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare dev almost made a third-person Vietnam spinoff

Sledgehammer Games' upcoming Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is pretty ambitious.

is pretty ambitious. It imagines what the realistic future of military combat will be—exoskeletons, private military, and even bigger explosions all seem likely. We also know that the future of military warfare will involve Kevin Spacey, which is nice. It's a logical leap for Sledgehammer, since a lot of its team previously worked on the Dead Spacesci-fi horror series. But according to Game Informer, the team's first CoD game was quite different than what's been revealed: it was almost a third-person shooter in Vietnam.

The new info on Sledgehammer's first attempt comes from Game Informer'sJune 2014 cover story, out digitally today. According to the story, Sledgehammer founders Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey initially built a team to work on a Call of Duty spin-off for Activision. The developer spent a significant amount of time on the project, with roughly 15 minutes of playable game as a result. "We had spent six or eight monhts on it," says Schofield, "and were really getting into the story."

The third-person shooter would have also been set during the Vietnam War. "Everyone thought that war was in Vietnam, right?" Shofield tells Game Informer. "It was in Cambodia and Laos, too. We did a lot of research on that war, a hidden war, and there were thousands of miles of underground tunnels." The team planned on using those tunnels as part of the setting, adding a bit of Dead Space-like claustrophobia to the Call of Duty formula.

Ultimately, Activision asked Sledgehammer to step in and help on Modern Warfare 3, and the project was abandoned in favor of giving Sledgehammer the reins on Advanced Warfare.

Game Informer's story includes even more details on Advanced Warfare, and is available to digital subscribersnow. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is set for release on November 4.