Remember when rumours were swirling about a Call of Duty game set during the Vietnam War?
In 2010, when it seemed like Activision was going to Southeast Asia, the publisher delivered the first Black Ops (which featured a handful of missions set in Vietnam) instead. That game was darkly paranoid but now-circulating concept art, spotted by IGN, shows how the scuttled Vietnam game might have wound up even more foreboding.
Created by artist Eddie Del Rio, whose work we’ve featured here on Kotaku previously, the three images show a village locale, crashing aeroplane and what are presumably enemy troops in hazy jungle environments. Recent reports revealed Activision dev studio Sledgehammer — who are the lead creators of this year’s Advanced Warfare — had been working on a demo for the Vietnam game. Players are used to the annual shootfests being glossy, setpiece-filled affairs, which makes the prospect of a darker, Apocalypse Now-influenced Call of Duty game feel a little bit intriguing.
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4 responses to “What A Call Of Duty In Vietnam Could’ve Looked Like”
Did the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army behead people? I know they tortured POWs (South Vietnamese and US alike), but beheading POWs always seemed to be more of an Imperial Japanese Army Thing. I’ve never heard of the North Vietnamese forces doing it.
It maybe that whoever led this particular contingents of both vietcong & nva was him or her self a prisoner of the japs back in ww2 & witnessed & learnt how to adapt and behave like them & taught these skills to their contigents in both the nva & vietcong
Alternatively, that might be a nod to how Call of Duty lacks basic researchers or something. CoD, particularly after 4 when it became a profit focused franchise, focussed on splosions and ignored much of the accurate rendition of (and did little research on) the weapons/vehicles, etc, outside of a cursory glance at wiki or google and made basic errors that most people would avoid. Things like many of the guns in-game being modelled on their airsoft counterparts instead of the actual weapons themselves. A cut scene in MW3 showing an F-15A Eagle (not the E) launching a Sparrow medium range air-to-air missile, yet, is described as an F-22 dropping a JDAM missile (the JDAM is actually a GPS guided bomb), many of the guns in Black Ops being used in missions set before they were actually designed (check it out on IMFDB).
To be honest, I’m not surprised to see something like the beheading image, given their lack of concern for details in the past. If was a specific act the game, then they would kind of have to put it in context for the viewer, since beheading someone in the Imperial Japanese style, set 20 years after WWII, in Vietnam (a place with no strong cultural Japanese influence) is a pretty clear clash of cultural references. It’d be akin to someone doing something similar to Australians by using cork hats on to portray Kiwis.
The first Black Ops was set in Vietnam? Oh yeah it was. My bad – now I remember. The later missions in the game.