During the early and mid 2000s, the video game industry was flooded with shooting games with many of them taking place during World War 2. Despite many shooters releasing during this period, you could stick out if you released a game that wasn’t just a standard first-person shooter and took place in a modern period. One series that managed to separate itself from the pack was Pivotal Games’ Conflict series.
The series started in 2002 with the release of Conflict: Desert Storm which went on to sell 800,000 copies. It’s sequel, Conflict: Desert Storm II, improved some of its predecessor’s negatives and helped the game develop a following among fans. However, after 2008’s Conflict: Denied Ops saw a massive departure from series norms, the studio wanted to go back to basics. With the promise to create a compelling gameplay experience, with strategy and collaboration between players at its core, the team started development of Warfare Afghanistan for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
This game was to feature a full coop campaign up to 4 players offline and online and even hired a military consultant to make the game as authentic as possible. While exact details are unknown, it would have had a plot involving the Afghanistan conflict and is said to have been way deeper than shooting games at the time with moral dilemmas.
So what caused the game to be cancelled? Well it had to do with their parent company Eidos Interactive. Despite still being in the early stages of development, the studio was disbanded in August 2008 by Eidos Interactive with many believing that internal restructure was to blame. It also probably didn’t help that the Conflict: Denied Ops has very low sales compared to previous entries.
Thankfully, the great folks over at Unseen64 have been able to archive 16 minutes of gameplay footage from the build (which was a pitch prototype). You can view that footage down below:
