10 Video Games You Didn't Realise Were Originally Open World
3. Call of Duty: Black Ops III
Though Call of Duty finally embraced an open world campaign with its acclaimed most recent entry, Black Ops 6, it almost happened an entire decade ago in Black Ops III.
While Black Ops III's campaign did feature a more open, less-linear level design than prior entries and supported four-player co-op, it was nevertheless scaled back from a full-fat open world campaign which developer Treyarch apparently spent around a year working on.
According to intrepid reporter Jason Schreier, Black Ops III's original open world was scrapped mid-development, forcing the dev team into a period of crunch to complete a more traditional Call of Duty campaign in time for the game's set-in-stone November 2015 release.
In late 2022, extensive work-in-progress images from the open world campaign were leaked online, showing off numerous large, interconnected areas far beyond the scope of a typical game in the franchise - at the time, at least.
On one hand, the reworked campaign is probably the series' wackiest ever, but the rushed development might also explain why it felt close to incomprehensible at times.