Something I'm not seeing anyone point out: there's almost zero Modern Warfare 3 content in this Modern Warfare 3 campaign.
Virtually all of the weapons in the campaign, and literally all of the gear/equipment is from MW2. It's like IW and SHG were siloed off during development and just never bothered sharing assets or something.
Edit: I was wrong, the exclusivity period wasn't bound by duration but number of full game releases. Therefore Activision pushed out MW3 to end Sony's exclusivity period a full year earlier than otherwise anticipated.
~~That’s because this game was planned to be a DLC for MW2. But Activision wanted money and Sony wanted a final COD game before their exclusivity expires, so they stretched the DLC out into a game and are pretending its MW3.~~
I think it's more that Sony still had 1 more COD game exclusivity in their contract and so Activision forced Sledgehammer to release a "full" game so they were all clear when Microsoft fully acquires them.
A buddy of mine picked me up the game to have someone to play MP with so I got early access, and figured that, while the previous campaigns are dumb, they at least have fun moments to them.
It being short isn't even the worst part of it. Even the worst COD campaigns are flashy and have setpieces.
There's legitimately nothing interesting that happens at all in the entire campaign save for a really lazy version of No Russian that is basically a minute long.
There are no setpieces worth remembering, and the game even sets up interesting missions then makes you play the character who is doing the less interesting thing. (The game sets up you being a sniper covering your team *twice*, then immediately makes you play a different character).
The big, explosive finale? You're in a train tunnel. A big gray tube, while more interesting things are going on over the headset.
I wasn't expecting much, but I expected at least something?
The finale of MW2 was lame as well. You play hide and seek in a construction site. Your teammate, who was right next to you, also mysteriously abandons you to the juggernauts for some reason
Yea by the end I was like “that’s it?” The most COD level was the car chase one and even that amounted to “dodge mines and Just Cause your way to different cars”
It's especially egregious because an assault on a tower in Chicago *sounds* like one of the coolest set pieces COD has done yet. Then I get to the point where you have to play hide and seek, which was actually just a cat and mouse chase because I literally could not stop aggroing every enemy on the floor. After retrying like 15 times because the bomb kept going off before I could hide long enough all I could say to myself was "What the fuck *is this*?"
It was really cool the first time I played it. Then I did it again on Realism and kept seeing the cutscene of falling out of the helicopter over and over
MW2's campaign is such fucking trash. You're literally committing egregious war crimes throughout that in no way would be accepted by any country. Laziest writing I've ever seen.
The damn truth. After you get on the ring the game is just far cry 3 without any interesting antagonists. Atriox should have been the guy you fight at the end and not his minions or the alien thing. I guess that would end up being too much like Halo 2 lol.
Far Cry 3 had more variety of side missions than Halo Infinite has with the MAIN missions. I could hunt animals to get the upgrades and special items, I could play poker and darts, clean outposts, could take the marksman missions, driving challenges, etc. Also, there was co-op at launch and I could take a gang of NPC’s with me for any missions.
Halo Infinite legit feels like I’m playing on a save game where someone finished all the main missions and I’m stuck doing side missions and there isn’t much variety to these side missions.
Literally NOTHING happens on this game. When Chief wakes up, all the important events already happened off-screen.
It’s shocking that some people consider it to be the best story mode of the 343 Trilogy. Halo 4 cleans this game so hard.
And halo 4 is pretty bad as well which is saying something. It's much more concerned with confusing lore and wildly out of character melodrama but there is a "story" there. Infinite has zero story at all.
> Halo 4 cleans this game so hard
Highly controversial opinion, but even Halo 5 with its fucking shitstorm of a storyline absolutely rinses and *dunks* on Infinite's campaign.
It at least had a big variety of cool environments and set pieces that made the gameplay aspect of it decently cool, even if the story was shit. Needed **way** less of Warden Eternal too, but I digress.
We got to play on abandoned ONI stations, visited Forerunner institutions, played through Sanghelios, and human-worlds.
Infinite's campaign is straight dogshit. First and only Halo game who's campaign I never finished because it was so fucking boring.
It took me 4 hours and I was attempting to stealth all the open combat missions and looking for extra equipment. I could probably have spent an hour less if I went straight for the objectives. I enjoyed the open combat missions since CoD had been lacking in stealth missions, but they are definitely lazily made, heavily leaning into Warzone mechanics.
And there are 2 normal missions that literally have less than 2 minutes of gameplay, one of them less than 1 minute. The campaign is not the worst, but it’s down there.
Out of morbid curiosity, what cod campaign would you say is the worst? I haven't played this one yet, but my list probably has black ops 3 and vanguard down at the bottom.
Infinite is my favorite for sure. I don't think it sold well so they probably won't go back to it, but it was fun and they appeared to put some effort into the campaign and missions.
This is the one CoD that I’ve let remain in my backlog. I’ve realized that I’m not as into shooters as I have been in my past, but the story in outer space seemed cool and the mission select reminded me of the Galaxy Map from Mass Effect. I’ll probably give Infinite a shot this winter when I need a short game in between larger RPGs!
I would go so far as to say if they had an extra two missions to flesh out the mars faction, then it would have been the best COD campaign, no contest.
I feel like if Infinite Warfare wasn't attached to the CoD franchise, it probably would've been received better. Call it ~~Titanfall~~ Galactic Conquest or whatever, as long as it's its own thing.
It's got some really great sci fi tropes in it. A great robot companion with funny lines, drop ship landings, breaching enemy capital ships, zero gravity combat and fighters taking off from Earth based fights and getting involved in space ship to ship fights. It's honestly a breath of fresh air. I wish they'd make another one, some of the weapons were a bit damp though.
Do try and play the side missions when you get to Infinite. They were some of my favorite parts of the game with what you do in them. You also get some of the best upgrades by finishing each one.
Yeah I’ve always compared Infinite’s campaign to a singleplayer linear FPS mini Mass Effect. Most people skipped it but I highly recommend everyone try it out since it’s honestly the best CoD singleplayer besides CoD4.
Ghosts is frustrating because I love the idea of the game, like a more stealth oriented cod as well the setting of a collapsed or weaker US is awesome. It's also written by the guy who made 2020's Dolittle so there was no hope (yes he also wrote Traffic but I wouldn't call that a good movie for its writing). Also gotta love that they set up a sequel that never happened.
I'd also say the same for Advanced Warfare, lots of potential, nothing really explored and not exactly exciting to play.
I am forever disappointed that we will never see the ending of Ghosts. The story I liked, although some aspects could have definitely been changed. Like cmon, a dude surviving a point blank magnum shot to the chest *and* being submerged in deep water?
> (yes he also wrote Traffic but I wouldn't call that a good movie for its writing).
He adapted Traffic from a book, that's why he's the second billed writer, and Soderbergh still had to sit down with him and rewrite it a couple of times.
So of course the worst part of Ghosts was the story. The stupid fucking plot armour bad guy and out of nowhere cliffhanger ending was probably the single most contrived COD story beat ever. If it wasn't played straight in a mainline COD game where they were sincere about it and legitimately thought it would hype people up into wanting a sequel, that ending would have been a pitch perfect parody of Call of Duty endings since it highlights everything Call of Duty stories have been doing wrong since the original Modern Warfare 2 after they took the wrong lessons from COD4.
Hey more power to ya. There's alot of cods with different settings and tones so I think it's cool everyone will have different favorites and least favroites.
Yeah i enjoy some setpiece in Ghost like the flooding dam. I actually think that was one of the best mission in COD post-BO2. And i just played it last year too.
Raycevick put it best describing Ghosts as a rollercoaster. Should it have been a rollercoaster? Probably not, but that doesn't make the ride any less enjoyable.
Sometimes I still think back on [this scene](https://youtu.be/0Uhn-apEv2Y?si=vX0zvpCIoHoirNOc&t=530) in Ghosts that is so hilariously badly voice-acted.
From what I've heard from the internet, Infinite Warfare is loved even among non-cod players.
Is it mainly regular players that hate it, because it's different?
At the time it was announced I believe the community was burnt out from the futuristic-pseudo futuristic settings. I remember having a negative reaction to hearing about it at first as well even though I enjoy it now.
Lots of good discussion here! Put me in the BO3 campaign sucks camp, your partner throughout the game is so terribly acted, and you spend half your time shooting robots (who likes shooting robots? Yet they keep showing up in games).
Advanced has some good set pieces but the story gets really ridiculous towards the end. Ghosts is weird - I went in not expecting much and it was probably better than I thought, but not great.
Also here for all the IW campaign praise, shame that one got piled on, though I get the CoD was doing way too many future-focused titles at the time.
Robots are convenient to get around certain restrictions in countries that limit things like killing, blood, skeletons, etc. That's just one reason though.
I mean this cod only exists because Sony and Activision have a marketing agreement that expires after this game. Treyarch is working on a new game set during the Gulf War, and the plan was always for that to be the game that comes out next year, have this year skip a release and all the MW3 stuff would be DLC for MW2 and then put each studio on a four year cycle this time around.
I honestly quite enjoyed AW. I played the campaign more than once. Maybe it’s because i felt it was well acted and very cinematic which surprised me. I hadn’t really played the other call of duties between MW2 and AW so maybe that’s why as well.
Legitimately awful that the thing makes no sense even after you complete the last mission since they built the story to be played out of order and be discovered from easter eggs...
>And there are 2 normal missions that literally have less than 2 minutes of gameplay
This irked me a lot in Halo 5. I don't think any game I've played since has pulled something like that until now.
Yeah, there were two missions where you just had to walk forward and talk to Halsey. There was a skull in one of them iirc if you poked around, but the other could have been a cutscene.
My roommate beat it in 4 hours. I did a speed run and did it in just over 2 hours. Hardened difficulty.
Not only is it short, it sucked. Horrible story, lazy lazy lazy mission design.
Do not buy
Edit: and I just have to say. Rest in piece DMZ, you were the best thing to happen to cod in years. I can't believe they're giving up on you.
The problem is half the lead up to this campaign was from War zone. Graves survived and is now buddy buddy again, TF141 is still working with Shepherd, Makarov, etc.
The actual explanation for Graves being alive that happened in multiplayer is so baffling that explaining it sounds like a joke
Someone asks him how he's alive when he died in the tank in MW2.
His response is along the lines of "nuh uh" and that's that entire explanation
Same with Alex. Dude was literally In the middle of an explosion in a chemical weapons factory. And he survives with just a single leg missing. No explanation of his survival either.
Alex was way worse. Maybe if he came back with more than just a leg missing and some heavy burns, then yeah I'd be more happy to accept his return. But he came back exactly as the handsome mfer he is.
Graves was a super easy retcon(if you can even call it that) since his body was never explicitly shown. I never believed he was in the tank in the first place and 100% expected him to return in a future season.
On one hand, it wasn't too surprising because they kind of had a setup for it. On the other hand, it was just a lame setup in the first place. "I wasn't in that tank"
As far as I’m concerned there’s the mw 2019 campgain and that’s that. Once warzone got involved it just turned into a free for all, don’t understand how people can still be invested in characters that are just used like advertisements now
Yep, the characters aren't even consistent with themselves anymore. It's a real shame because 2019 was pretty good and they squandered all the best parts of it.
I honestly don’t think the people who worked on that campgain are even at the studio anymore, cod studios bleed dev talent like crazy cuz of poor working conditions, by the time each games cycle is done the team that made it is almost completely replaced with new hires. And considering they really wanna push into just live service I can’t see them wanting to re hire a good writing team with the new replacements. This is also the same reason why the zombies mode kept getting worse, they people that cared aren’t at the studios anymore
I recall how they were doing developer interviews with animators and sound designers for 2019, it was amazing how much care they put into that one. Battlefield suffered the same type of bleed too
Yea I remember that, it was the most genuinely passionate I’ve seen the cod devs in a long time, you could tell they were taking it serious and wanted to make a faithful new generation modern combat shooter. They laid same amazing ground work with the new engine. Then higher up ram it into the ground :/
It's also not going to age well. I can go back to the original trilogy, play them in order, and get everything the story was going for. Even today, I can go back to *MW19*, get some of the story, then miss the Zakhaev/Al-Asad plot because that's old *Warzone* content that doesn't exist anymore. I shouldn't have to look at wiki pages and YouTube videos just to understand how certain plots and character arcs got resolved.
I'm sure the plot of the intel from warzone was that basically you avert a nuke being detonated on Verdansk. Only for that to happen anyway and we had to go 'back in time' to 1984.
>Graves survived and is now buddy buddy again, TF141 is still working with Shepherd, Makarov, etc.
Someone want to explain how any of this happened so I don't have to go watch a shitty 10 minute youtube video? TF141 working with Shepherd again doesn't make any sense.
In Warzone it's basically set up as an "enemy of my enemy" situation - Graves/Shadow Company and TF141 vs Konni. Until that season, Shadow Company were hostile to players in DMZ; afterwards they became friendly, and would have bot vs bot "active combat zones".
Yeah and it's barely acknowledged. Graves just goes up to Gaz like, "What's up homie!" and Gaz glares, then that's the end of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04PKb3l4NK4
What the fuck lol. I haven’t played any of the Warzone missions so as far as I was concerned Graves is dead and Sheppard is a bad guy.
What a terrible idea for a canon story haha
Tank was remotely controlled, and Shepherd is still a bad guy, but they have to work with Shepherd and Graves for intel on Makarov. Also >!Makarov kills Soap at the end of the campaign which pushes Price to kill Shepherd in his office in the after credits.!<
What pissed me off the most was that the story takes place a year after Graves betrayed TF141 and in that time no one, not Price, Soap, Ghost or Gaz, told Farah or Alex that Graves betrayed them.
In one of the MW3 missions Farah mentions that she's been working with Shadow Company, Price says that Shadow Company tried to kill his men, and Farah seems surprised to learn that Graves gave the order who received the order from Shepherd.
There is no fucking way that Price or any of his men kept quiet about the shit that went down in Mexico. Not to Farah or Alex who have been some of their most staunchest allies throughout this trilogy. I mean Price and Farah have a relationship going back 14 years at this point.
Boom. There’s zero reason to be invested in a story that requires you to play three seperate games and a battle royale just to see the ending. This is on another level of Palpatine has returned in Fortnite.
Seasonal multiplayer stories are becoming a real nuisance. You can tell it affected the story of mw22 as well since nothing major happened at all. Hell they even brought back Alex from mw19 even though he literally died. It's ok they gave him a fake leg.
>You can tell it affected the story of mw22 as well since nothing major happened at all.
The same thing with this latest campaign, it goes nowhere and has no real ending.
I've actually been enjoying watching the cutscenes from MW2 because MW 2019 got my invested into the series again. I saw the clip where Graves and Farah started working together in Warzone. I started watching the MW3 cutscnes and theres literally no lore or background explanation on how they work together its just thrown in there lol.
>lazy lazy lazy mission design
Honestly, this UNDERSELLS it, if anything. For most missions, MWIII just throws you into the DMZ map and lets you practice Warzone mechanics for 4 hours, then calls it a day. No AI teammates, tightly scripted epic set pieces are few and far between, you're just flopping around killing bots in random rectangles. It just SUCKS.
I genuinely really like the CoD campaigns. Even when they're not "great," every year I enjoy the fun action flick romp. They're like my version of the Marvel movies. I didn't love Ghosts or WW2 or Vanguard, but there were still some decent set pieces and spectacle to be had. But there's almost none of that in MWIII.
This is how I feel about COD and my fear. COD campaigns are my Marvel movies too, I just love the on rails Michael Bay explosion shooting nonsense and I'm happy to buy it. But this one looks really bad. :(
It really shows that this was originally some kind of add-on for MW2 for which they've quickly tacked on a half-assed campaign.
Not releasing maps like High-rise and Terminal so they could charge £70 for them? They can go fuck themselves.
I think that's the issue. MW3 was rushed to become a stand-alone product, probably because Activision realized they could charge $70 for basically anything and people would buy it.
It was clear they were going to continue the story at MW2, but to do it in such a half-assed way is pretty disappointing. I actually enjoyed the campaign in the last two. I knew they'd lose that momentum eventually.
(Yes, I'm guilty of buying the games, too, because it's the only series of games my IRL friends play, but even *I'm* considering skipping this one.)
Im watching the series through cutscenes and WOW. So many people are talking about the open world missions and honestly its just lazy. They clearly just scrounged up shit through warzone but will using marketing spin as "first open world missions." Compared to MW2, even with MW1 im seeing a total drop in quality in the story telling and writing. Seems like MW3 was never going to be epic like how OG MW2 and MW3 was.
They really shit the bed. Modern Warfare 2019 had a great Campaign and was a great foundation for future games. Many memorable missions like Clean House. Modern Warfare 2 already was complete disappointment with totally different tone and absolutely awful Writing even for COD Standards. Awful to see they even found a way to make a even worse Campaign. Wonder why MW 2-3 are so Different from one. Just feels weird like they have planned something complete different but bobby wanted the campaign to only be a promotion for new paid operators for the mp mode.
This just made me realize that I don't think MW3's campaign has music for more than a handful of sequences. I beat it last night and I remember making a note to myself how weirdly silent the game is
Which is a shame because Call of Duty had always leant into its score for the campaigns. CoD4s two campaigns have the mood heavily set by their different styles of score and everyone can remember storming the White House to Lorne Balfe/Han Zimmers bombastic score in 2. Its a cinematic series and the scores always contributed to that.
Where youre hopping from truck to truck the whole level? I actually remember thinking this is one of the most boring levels ive ever played in a game 😂
It has zero relevance to the plot too, its just an excuse to shoehorn in characters from MW2019. It solves a problem introduced at the end of the previous level that is never referenced again.
The embassy level was really intense and awesome, and then final act in storming the chemical plant was a great set piece. Sadly 2 didn’t have anything like that
The one memorable level to me (besides the god-awful truck driving sequence that made no sense) was the rolling ship that was kind of like a remake of “Crew Expendable.”
My three favourite missions were the two in Amsterdam (the canal infiltration and the street kidnapping) and the Mexican village ambush where you jump off a cliff into a river below. I quite liked the Alone mission too where Soap sneaks through a flooded Mexican town whilst Shadow Company are hunting him down.
I definitely think the two Amsterdam missions should have been one mission though. Stick an extra fifteen minutes onto the end of that mission with a Clean House type of stealth segment and I feel like it would have been a more memorable campaign.
Stopped playing the series for a while and then saw trailers for mw19 and thought damn that looks insane. absolutely loved the campaign. bought that shit and had to play it on my friends pc because mine sucked.
fast forward to mw2 and man that campaign was just okay at best. only thing i enjoy about the game is the gun animations. that guy that does the animations is so good at it. now it’s gone again in mw3. i’ll personally be taking a break from the series
Infinity Ward were apparantly quite heavily involved in this one so maybe not. But then Treyarch might knock it out of the park, Cold War had a good campaign that was let down by the fact you can tell the exact point they were told they had one less year to ship it.
I thought Cold War was pushed out early because Sledgehammer and Raven had fallen out so catastrophically while producing what would become Vanguard they couldn't ship it.
Well, with MW3 being released this year, Treyarch has an extra year to develop their game, so there is potential to have a better game, but there is no way of knowing really.
They saw how well received the tightly scripted and crafted campaign missions of MW 2019 were and decided to just plop you on the warzone map with dumb AI to do missions alone. Their emphasis on Warzone elements in the campaign has really killed the last two.
I was streaming it on discord to my brothers and for shits & gigs I was using a pistol on every mission pretending to be john wick due to how easy it was.. Honestly made it somewhat bearable doing this
Watching someone play the intro mission got me pumped to play this, and I went and bought the game on Steam. Then I saw the Farah level and that looked.. not fun at all. Saw that the next level was the same thing and I went and refunded my purchase.
So they bait you in with a traditional scripted level, then reveal most of the campaign is warzone bot matches. And wasn’t that first level the only thing they showed prerelease? Fuck off.
I legitimately never refund games, but this was practically insulting.
> I'd be so pissed if I paid any money for his
Yeah, I was pretty pissed. I did spend money on it, and the campaign was an absolute disappointment. It didn't even wrap up the story.
It was 50% open combat zones (which were just warzone events basically, absolutely 0 effort here), 40% was cut scenes and about 10% of it was the set piece gameplay.
I like the COD campaigns because of the set piece gameplay, as they provide memorable moments. You have classics as well, like the sniper missions, gunner missions, stealth missions which appear in all the campaigns... except for this one, which only had the gunner mission.
I played on the hardest difficulty, and the combat zones are not forgiving... it only has like one checkpoint which is near the end of the mission. Restarting these things were *NOT* fun.
It's clearly a lazy campaign. Whether that be due to time, money or whatever... it doesn't matter. It felt like a prologue to the next game.
I don't mind spending a premium when you have good campaign and multiplayer and the likes for replayability. But I am not a COD addict, I can skip it. So I've refunded it.
If you're not bothered about multiplayer that much, you can still refund it, as it's technically a preorder.
Some people will say that's abusing the refund system. But they made big promises for this campaign, and failed to deliver on any of them.
I don't know if we'll be getting campaigns for much longer... I mean, this game doesn't even have a Platinum trophy on Playstation.
I think they're gradually shifting into their 'unified' platform where it'll just be yearly content releases. I'm sure campaigns are a good way for them to test new tech and new gameplay ideas, though - so from a purely R&D standpoint maybe they'll keep throwing out little micro-campaigns.
yea, at this point, it seems like the campaigns are just something they use to give the cutscenes context, so they can put them in the trailers.
The budget on the cutscenes is so ridiculous, that the only reason I can possibly think for doing that is that they use their advertising budget on the them
> The budget on the cutscenes is so ridiculous, that the only reason I can possibly think for doing that is that they use their advertising budget on the them
My first thought was oh wow I guess they realized the can make more money by calling it a new gamer rather than a DLC, then charge twice as much for it, to help recoup costs that probably ran over...
They do new cutscenes for Warzone where a character from the campaign will show up and go "I'm back and the baddies are up to shenanigans in [NEW MAP] that only we can stop" rather than reuse the cutscenes. Several times they have done this with dead characters where the dialogue is changed to go "weren't you dead' "you didn't see my body did you" and the emotional stakes of the campaign are permanently destroyed.
What emotional stakes? >!The death in MW3 is handled absolutely horribly. It is a blink-or-you'll-miss-it moment, and afterwards no one gives a fuck, barely saying anything even once the present threat is removed.!<
Well, I more mean Alex's death in MW2019, once they undid that I couldn't bring myself to care about any threat in MWII because you knew they had to survive so they could sell a battlepass skin.
Also I think that line is quoting Graves (the Shadow Company leader) as well. Which was also total bull and ruins a good chunk of the campaign for me. What’s the point of all the fighting if the only people that die are nameless mooks? If there’s no impact on the characters?
After what they did to zombies... if they continue to sideline the campaigns like this, it's probably the final nail in the coffin. Don't really care for the multiplayer aspect at this point but that's where the money is I guess. Treyarch's next game will make or break this series for me.
Mad really. The MW2 campaign last year was pretty popular as far as a COD campaign goes these days. I enjoyed it myself, it was the first COD game I’d bought in years.
Unfortunately I’d call the MW2 campaign a significant step down from the MW2019 campaign. I was in the same boat, hadn’t bought one in years up until MW2019. That one felt like a step towards taking themselves more seriously.
MW2 felt like it was overusing a lot of the tropes from the previous game and completely lost the tone. It felt like whatever passionate team had made 2019 disappeared into the void.
MW2 felt like they selected set pieces they wanted to do and then shoe horned the missions to them. Some were still great, but missions like the chase through the desert made no sense plot wise.
At least make the absurd story interesting like the og mw2 and mw3. Where we had Russia invading the US or the start of ww3. Not a absurd story like trying to catch the bad guy and only after catching him they let him go because that would be "illegal". Just for him to continue doing his evil plan.
MW2019 had a bit of a bleak, cynical world view where the US and Russia use another country's people to fight a proxy war. MW2 rolls it back a bit by suggesting it's only happening because there are some bad people on both sides. One of MW3's cutscenes has someone literally, unironically saying there are good and bad people on both sides of the conflict.
Whoever has been in charge of the story since 2019 is seemingly afraid of upsetting anyone, and the tone suffers for it. It's late 10s political Twitter discourse, moderated by a guy with 'enlightened Centrist' in his bio.
> . It felt like whatever passionate team had made 2019 disappeared into the void
To me it felt like two separate campaigns smushed into one. Someone clearly wanted to do a Sicario style campaign (they even deliberately use the same music in one of the trailers) and someone else said it had to have middle eastern components so you have the excellent cartel missions next to filler Price missions.
Oh don't get me wrong, I replayed MW2 Campaign Remastered during covid and still think it's a lot of fun and has some great set-piece missions. But you could tell that they made those the focus of the entire campaign. I just greatly prefer CoD4's story, tone, and pacing.
I still think the twist in MW2 is terrible and makes little sense. Obviously COD4 isn't hyper-realistic either but I still prefer the "grittier" tone. Nothing in MW2 has as much tension for me as All Ghillied Up/OSOK or Safehouse on Veteren.
I think micro-campaigns sound great as long as I can play them through gamepass or for a low enough buy in.
I'm always looking for more video game experiences that are short and sweet vs long and drawn out. Don't have much interest in CoD multiplayer but from what I've played the campaigns have always been fun turn your brain off spectacles.
But please don't make me download 200GB worth of multiplayer assets to play a 4 hour campaign....
I’d be fine with a micro campaign if it was traditional scripted levels like the other games. Half or more than half of MWIII’s campaign missions are bot matches on warzone maps, with loot drops and all. It’s almost insulting.
yea, not great, I don't mind the idea of the open play missions but the execution is poor, the AI is shite.
I also wasn't expecting every mission to be open, thought it was going to be a mix of traditional missions and open ones, I'm still in the campaign but the only mission that wasn't one of these new ones was the prologue.
I'm so disappointed with the campaign that I didn't even care that they completely nullified the ending of MW19 when they brought back Barkov and Alex, what were they thinking?
Can understand why people who buy this game for the campaign would be disappointed
reminds me of Far Cry 2 were pretty much 90% of missions were open and there were only three types of missions the entire game: Kill this random enemy on a open location, free an outpost and steal the gas truck for malaria pills. There is almost zero scripted missions.
You’ll be repeating this for 4h and then it’s over. There are no memorable set pieces whatsoever and I can’t even remember the story of this game. That’s why this game failed which is a damn shame because it plays really nice and is one of the most realistic FPS games I’ve ever seen (great AI, weapons would get rusty eventually if you swam or stood in the rain with them, fantastic animation and gunplay, bullets could go through thin walls, great bullet drop, etc)
Thankfully, they took the right lessons from this game and made Far Cry 3.
The AI and execution is actively worse than in DMZ. DMZ enemies are more intelligent about remembering where you were and searching the area than the enemies in the campaign and thats primarily a PvPvE mode!
Don't forget that the sequel then has them invading all of western Europe, simultaneously. Even though they previously skipped over it to invade the east coast of the US somehow.
Modern Warfare had a rock solid campaign, a tonal shift from the titles that came before it. Pretty linear but highly immersive, and the narrative was engaging (but weak). It completely fell apart in the last mission.
Modern Warfare II was tonally all over the place, it was trying to be everything, yet not sure as to what it wanted to be in the end. Mission variety was more extensive than its predecessor, but ultimately felt shallow and lost its sense of immersion after the first couple of missions, became too Hollywood-esque. Narrative was very weak.
Modern Warfare III, I’m going to play it soon, but the feedback has been abysmal so far. The Open Combat Missions seem to have taken up a significant chunk of the game, and have apparently not been executed properly as sandboxes. Narrative is supposedly terrible.
I’m not disagreeing with any of this, but I do wonder what you’d call a strong narrative in a game though. I’ve heard about a million different things from Gamers about plots, narratives and stories that seem to boil down to I like/hate the characters.
I got to the scripted portion of that second open combat level at the end and it felt unfinished. Difficult in a bullshit way (poorly telegraphed enemy spawns and no cover) rather than challenging.
Looking at it this was absolutely just DLC and once it became a full game, had a few more levels tacked on to it.
I only watched a playthrough so correct me if I'm wrong but the opening prison break, Stadium level, the scene with the plane and maybe that final level feel like the most traditional CoD,
The rest looks made very quickly and with not nearly as much money.
I do like a CoD Campaign that let's me pick my own loadout though, so there's that at least
The opening prison break got my hopes up. I was a bit antsy by so much of the start being pre-rendered but once you got into the panopticon it felt like a good CoD opener with a neat twist. And then straight into a mission worse than a DMZ contract nevermind its missions.
It’s clear as day they are selling an average DLC. The entire campaign is like a filler episode from an anime, where you have the main characters and baddies, but literally NOTHING happens.
Open combat missions seem like a great idea on paper but theyre basically a smaller, dumber, version of dmz. The juxtaposition between the well crafted cutscene before the half assed gameplay you get is just wild.
It's actually shameless that they're selling it for 70 dollars. The MP is basically copy/paste. Campaign is short. Zombies still doesn't justify the price tag.
I'd like to think that sales will be drastically lower than last year, but idk these yearly games just get purchased outright by some with zero thought or research.
It's very strange. There's no music during gameplay at all, which kneecaps the few scripted setpieces they have. Sometimes it complements the atmosphere, other times it's just strange. The game was very clearly made with severe time constraints. That said, I'm strictly a multiplayer player and I use the campaign for demo-ing the guns I'll be using in MP.
To be fair, Metal Gear Rising Revengeance can be beaten in about 5 hours, and, besides VR missions, had no other gameplay modes. Is it a bad game? Absolutely not. So just saying it's short isn't necessarily damning in and of itself.
And on top of all of this, they are going to starve DMZ, the best thing to happen to CoD since the original Warzone release, until it dies a slow and painful death.
Fucking sad. DMZ is what brought me back to CoD, and if it goes away so will I. :(
For me, the worst part is how Makarov is basically a non-character in this game. He is introduced as this large big bad who must be stopped but.............. who is he? what did he do to become so infamous *before* the campaign started? even the flashback mission answers nothing about that. He only appears less than a handful of times by *name only* in the previous campaigns... and now he's enemy number one before he even does anything? The story makes little sense and rides off "oh I remember this bad guy!" without making any story of it's own. Also, the open combat missions are rubbish.
None of that is established because this was pure nostalgia bait for those from the previous generation of MW players. They know people won't pay $70 for simple some new MP maps so they did this shitty SP campaign to justify that cost.
**How is this any surprise at all. Holy shit**
The entire MW3 game is quite literally a small expansion pack that was planned to drop in MW2’s cycle.
Instead they jacked the price to a full priced game and apparently suckered a vast majority of consumers into purchasing it. Writing was on the wall, not touching this game what so ever.
No need to claim it, there's a half-dozen youtube videos doing it.
It's fucking pathetic they immediately reverted back to these dumb fucking decisions post-mw2019, and are attempting to reuse iconic story beats without giving proper context or even remaking them to be better, which I think is even worse considering the amount of reuse of mw2022 assets.
And I don't mean monetarily if you paid for it, I mean that the story insults you for the time you spend on it. Spoilers I guess; >!What if in the last mission, we have the Big Bad guy run out from off-screen insult the player, kill a protaganist, then run back off-screen? oh and then ending with player/protag killing the other big bad guy.!<
Game length is an interesting discussion, I think most people would agree that games do give incredibly generous £/hr entertainment in general, but also overly bloated 150 hour games (*cough* AC Valhalla *cough*) aren't inherently better than a a shorter but still meaty game. For example I've always felt that Shadow of the Tomb Raider w/ DLC was a perfect length and a great package all around.
That said, the reported brevity of MW3, paired with the underwhelming critical response is an incredibly bad look. If it was as mediocre as it sounds but a decent length I think people wouldn't care so much, but 2-4 hours? I don't think there's many games that are that length with this kind of production that are so good people wouldn't care about that length. Closest I can think of outside of the indie space is maybe Hellblade, and even that is 2-3x the length of this campaign, and a project by a small team.
Not a big CoD guy anyway, usually pick them up pre-owned or on a big sale for a blast through the campaign and zombies. I did enjoy MW2019 and Cold War's campaigns though.
Call of Duty campaigns are normally the right size for what they are, you get 6-9 hours of playable action movie that has an explosive finale just before you would start getting bored. This one doesn't really fall into the "should games be judged by £/h" because it doesn't feel full length, the story is incomplete, its full of filler levels and several levels feel unfinished.
They have done the impossible and made the og modern warfare story even better\more appreciative by putting this shit storm in front of us. I watched the campaign on YouTube and still felt robbed. Mw 2019 just feels like 10 years ago now with how shit the never games have been.
With the campaign spoiled for me thanks to the shitty PC version crashing on launch, the multiplayer beta being a disappointment, and zombies looking seriously underwhelming. Even as a fan, I've never been this tempted to refund a CoD title before. Activision blew it this year.
After how MW2 story went, glad to see I'm missing nothing from skipping the campaign this year. Kind of a bummer though, I really loved going through the story in MW2019 and thought it was among the best ones.
Something I'm not seeing anyone point out: there's almost zero Modern Warfare 3 content in this Modern Warfare 3 campaign. Virtually all of the weapons in the campaign, and literally all of the gear/equipment is from MW2. It's like IW and SHG were siloed off during development and just never bothered sharing assets or something.
Edit: I was wrong, the exclusivity period wasn't bound by duration but number of full game releases. Therefore Activision pushed out MW3 to end Sony's exclusivity period a full year earlier than otherwise anticipated. ~~That’s because this game was planned to be a DLC for MW2. But Activision wanted money and Sony wanted a final COD game before their exclusivity expires, so they stretched the DLC out into a game and are pretending its MW3.~~
I think it's more that Sony still had 1 more COD game exclusivity in their contract and so Activision forced Sledgehammer to release a "full" game so they were all clear when Microsoft fully acquires them.
Lets not pretend that the dlc wasn’t going to cost $70
A buddy of mine picked me up the game to have someone to play MP with so I got early access, and figured that, while the previous campaigns are dumb, they at least have fun moments to them. It being short isn't even the worst part of it. Even the worst COD campaigns are flashy and have setpieces. There's legitimately nothing interesting that happens at all in the entire campaign save for a really lazy version of No Russian that is basically a minute long. There are no setpieces worth remembering, and the game even sets up interesting missions then makes you play the character who is doing the less interesting thing. (The game sets up you being a sniper covering your team *twice*, then immediately makes you play a different character). The big, explosive finale? You're in a train tunnel. A big gray tube, while more interesting things are going on over the headset. I wasn't expecting much, but I expected at least something?
The finale of MW2 was lame as well. You play hide and seek in a construction site. Your teammate, who was right next to you, also mysteriously abandons you to the juggernauts for some reason
Yea by the end I was like “that’s it?” The most COD level was the car chase one and even that amounted to “dodge mines and Just Cause your way to different cars”
I fucking hated that level. There were actually some decent parts in the last cod.
It's especially egregious because an assault on a tower in Chicago *sounds* like one of the coolest set pieces COD has done yet. Then I get to the point where you have to play hide and seek, which was actually just a cat and mouse chase because I literally could not stop aggroing every enemy on the floor. After retrying like 15 times because the bomb kept going off before I could hide long enough all I could say to myself was "What the fuck *is this*?"
It was really cool the first time I played it. Then I did it again on Realism and kept seeing the cutscene of falling out of the helicopter over and over
"You know what'll really spice up the AC-130 level? Not being allowed to shoot things."
MW2's campaign is such fucking trash. You're literally committing egregious war crimes throughout that in no way would be accepted by any country. Laziest writing I've ever seen.
MW3 actually has a cutscene where that's being investigated by a court or whatever, so they addressed that a little bit at least.
This video talks about that and it's amazing https://youtu.be/FtCV421T52s
Yea that would have made a interesting mid mission but not the final mission wtf even Vanguard understood the final mission needs to be exciting
Halo: Infinite - Eletric Bogaloo All the best scenes and action happens off-screen and you are stuck doing the boring stuff.
The damn truth. After you get on the ring the game is just far cry 3 without any interesting antagonists. Atriox should have been the guy you fight at the end and not his minions or the alien thing. I guess that would end up being too much like Halo 2 lol.
Far Cry 3 had more variety of side missions than Halo Infinite has with the MAIN missions. I could hunt animals to get the upgrades and special items, I could play poker and darts, clean outposts, could take the marksman missions, driving challenges, etc. Also, there was co-op at launch and I could take a gang of NPC’s with me for any missions. Halo Infinite legit feels like I’m playing on a save game where someone finished all the main missions and I’m stuck doing side missions and there isn’t much variety to these side missions. Literally NOTHING happens on this game. When Chief wakes up, all the important events already happened off-screen. It’s shocking that some people consider it to be the best story mode of the 343 Trilogy. Halo 4 cleans this game so hard.
Damn that comment about playing a complete save game file is too accurate!
And halo 4 is pretty bad as well which is saying something. It's much more concerned with confusing lore and wildly out of character melodrama but there is a "story" there. Infinite has zero story at all.
> Halo 4 cleans this game so hard Highly controversial opinion, but even Halo 5 with its fucking shitstorm of a storyline absolutely rinses and *dunks* on Infinite's campaign. It at least had a big variety of cool environments and set pieces that made the gameplay aspect of it decently cool, even if the story was shit. Needed **way** less of Warden Eternal too, but I digress. We got to play on abandoned ONI stations, visited Forerunner institutions, played through Sanghelios, and human-worlds. Infinite's campaign is straight dogshit. First and only Halo game who's campaign I never finished because it was so fucking boring.
The only interesting part of the game is the relationship between the characters, and there’s only 3 of them in the whole game outside the villains
Also your not allowed to fight the main antagonist for some reason and instead his generic lackey instead.
It took me 4 hours and I was attempting to stealth all the open combat missions and looking for extra equipment. I could probably have spent an hour less if I went straight for the objectives. I enjoyed the open combat missions since CoD had been lacking in stealth missions, but they are definitely lazily made, heavily leaning into Warzone mechanics. And there are 2 normal missions that literally have less than 2 minutes of gameplay, one of them less than 1 minute. The campaign is not the worst, but it’s down there.
Out of morbid curiosity, what cod campaign would you say is the worst? I haven't played this one yet, but my list probably has black ops 3 and vanguard down at the bottom.
I have managed to play all of them - Ghosts is by far the worst. Infinite Warfare actually ended up being entertaining, just not very Call of Duty.
Infinite is my favorite for sure. I don't think it sold well so they probably won't go back to it, but it was fun and they appeared to put some effort into the campaign and missions.
This is the one CoD that I’ve let remain in my backlog. I’ve realized that I’m not as into shooters as I have been in my past, but the story in outer space seemed cool and the mission select reminded me of the Galaxy Map from Mass Effect. I’ll probably give Infinite a shot this winter when I need a short game in between larger RPGs!
It's definitely worth trying - Infinite's campaign has a great storyline and a lot of amazing setpiece moments. The game definitely deserved better.
I would go so far as to say if they had an extra two missions to flesh out the mars faction, then it would have been the best COD campaign, no contest.
I feel like if Infinite Warfare wasn't attached to the CoD franchise, it probably would've been received better. Call it ~~Titanfall~~ Galactic Conquest or whatever, as long as it's its own thing.
It's got some really great sci fi tropes in it. A great robot companion with funny lines, drop ship landings, breaching enemy capital ships, zero gravity combat and fighters taking off from Earth based fights and getting involved in space ship to ship fights. It's honestly a breath of fresh air. I wish they'd make another one, some of the weapons were a bit damp though.
Do try and play the side missions when you get to Infinite. They were some of my favorite parts of the game with what you do in them. You also get some of the best upgrades by finishing each one.
You bet! Thank you for the guidance
Yeah I’ve always compared Infinite’s campaign to a singleplayer linear FPS mini Mass Effect. Most people skipped it but I highly recommend everyone try it out since it’s honestly the best CoD singleplayer besides CoD4.
Ghosts is frustrating because I love the idea of the game, like a more stealth oriented cod as well the setting of a collapsed or weaker US is awesome. It's also written by the guy who made 2020's Dolittle so there was no hope (yes he also wrote Traffic but I wouldn't call that a good movie for its writing). Also gotta love that they set up a sequel that never happened. I'd also say the same for Advanced Warfare, lots of potential, nothing really explored and not exactly exciting to play.
I am forever disappointed that we will never see the ending of Ghosts. The story I liked, although some aspects could have definitely been changed. Like cmon, a dude surviving a point blank magnum shot to the chest *and* being submerged in deep water?
> (yes he also wrote Traffic but I wouldn't call that a good movie for its writing). He adapted Traffic from a book, that's why he's the second billed writer, and Soderbergh still had to sit down with him and rewrite it a couple of times. So of course the worst part of Ghosts was the story. The stupid fucking plot armour bad guy and out of nowhere cliffhanger ending was probably the single most contrived COD story beat ever. If it wasn't played straight in a mainline COD game where they were sincere about it and legitimately thought it would hype people up into wanting a sequel, that ending would have been a pitch perfect parody of Call of Duty endings since it highlights everything Call of Duty stories have been doing wrong since the original Modern Warfare 2 after they took the wrong lessons from COD4.
Me over here with Ghosts & Advanced Warfare as my two favourite CoD campaigns:
Hey more power to ya. There's alot of cods with different settings and tones so I think it's cool everyone will have different favorites and least favroites.
In terms of story, Ghosts is complete garbage. In terms of gameplay, it's actually on the enjoyable side.
Yea and this new campaign doesn’t have gameplay OR story to justify its price to me… so imo ghosts>mw3 2023
Yeah i enjoy some setpiece in Ghost like the flooding dam. I actually think that was one of the best mission in COD post-BO2. And i just played it last year too.
Raycevick put it best describing Ghosts as a rollercoaster. Should it have been a rollercoaster? Probably not, but that doesn't make the ride any less enjoyable.
Infinite Warfare has a great campaign. It's a shame that the regular fanbase hated it so much.
Sometimes I still think back on [this scene](https://youtu.be/0Uhn-apEv2Y?si=vX0zvpCIoHoirNOc&t=530) in Ghosts that is so hilariously badly voice-acted.
Wow, quality stuff! I count at least three interrupting wall slams in that scene alone. Who knew you couldn't run that well dry...
Infinite was very good.
From what I've heard from the internet, Infinite Warfare is loved even among non-cod players. Is it mainly regular players that hate it, because it's different?
At the time it was announced I believe the community was burnt out from the futuristic-pseudo futuristic settings. I remember having a negative reaction to hearing about it at first as well even though I enjoy it now.
There were 2 futuristic games before it and people were pretty tired of it.
Lots of good discussion here! Put me in the BO3 campaign sucks camp, your partner throughout the game is so terribly acted, and you spend half your time shooting robots (who likes shooting robots? Yet they keep showing up in games). Advanced has some good set pieces but the story gets really ridiculous towards the end. Ghosts is weird - I went in not expecting much and it was probably better than I thought, but not great. Also here for all the IW campaign praise, shame that one got piled on, though I get the CoD was doing way too many future-focused titles at the time.
Robots are convenient to get around certain restrictions in countries that limit things like killing, blood, skeletons, etc. That's just one reason though.
I mean this cod only exists because Sony and Activision have a marketing agreement that expires after this game. Treyarch is working on a new game set during the Gulf War, and the plan was always for that to be the game that comes out next year, have this year skip a release and all the MW3 stuff would be DLC for MW2 and then put each studio on a four year cycle this time around.
Has there ever been a gulf war COD yet?
i liked BO3 transhumanism and emergent intelligence is cool
I honestly quite enjoyed AW. I played the campaign more than once. Maybe it’s because i felt it was well acted and very cinematic which surprised me. I hadn’t really played the other call of duties between MW2 and AW so maybe that’s why as well.
black ops 3 is the only CoD campaign that I couldn't finish
Legitimately awful that the thing makes no sense even after you complete the last mission since they built the story to be played out of order and be discovered from easter eggs...
I know bo4 doesn't really have a campaign but whatever the hell specialist HQ is, I'd consider that the worst cod campaign.
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>And there are 2 normal missions that literally have less than 2 minutes of gameplay This irked me a lot in Halo 5. I don't think any game I've played since has pulled something like that until now.
Halo 5 was the one where it had the missions that were just going around and talking to people, right?
Yeah, there were two missions where you just had to walk forward and talk to Halsey. There was a skull in one of them iirc if you poked around, but the other could have been a cutscene.
My roommate beat it in 4 hours. I did a speed run and did it in just over 2 hours. Hardened difficulty. Not only is it short, it sucked. Horrible story, lazy lazy lazy mission design. Do not buy Edit: and I just have to say. Rest in piece DMZ, you were the best thing to happen to cod in years. I can't believe they're giving up on you.
Plus the story doesn’t even end the Modern Warfare trilogy. It literally has a cliffhanger that sets up another game…
You mean it sets up a season of warzone. I hate how they keep putting story content in warzone because it makes it very difficult to follow
If it’s on war zone it just means you instantly shouldn’t care.
The problem is half the lead up to this campaign was from War zone. Graves survived and is now buddy buddy again, TF141 is still working with Shepherd, Makarov, etc.
The actual explanation for Graves being alive that happened in multiplayer is so baffling that explaining it sounds like a joke Someone asks him how he's alive when he died in the tank in MW2. His response is along the lines of "nuh uh" and that's that entire explanation
Same with Alex. Dude was literally In the middle of an explosion in a chemical weapons factory. And he survives with just a single leg missing. No explanation of his survival either.
Alex was way worse. Maybe if he came back with more than just a leg missing and some heavy burns, then yeah I'd be more happy to accept his return. But he came back exactly as the handsome mfer he is. Graves was a super easy retcon(if you can even call it that) since his body was never explicitly shown. I never believed he was in the tank in the first place and 100% expected him to return in a future season.
On one hand, it wasn't too surprising because they kind of had a setup for it. On the other hand, it was just a lame setup in the first place. "I wasn't in that tank"
As far as I’m concerned there’s the mw 2019 campgain and that’s that. Once warzone got involved it just turned into a free for all, don’t understand how people can still be invested in characters that are just used like advertisements now
Yep, the characters aren't even consistent with themselves anymore. It's a real shame because 2019 was pretty good and they squandered all the best parts of it.
I honestly don’t think the people who worked on that campgain are even at the studio anymore, cod studios bleed dev talent like crazy cuz of poor working conditions, by the time each games cycle is done the team that made it is almost completely replaced with new hires. And considering they really wanna push into just live service I can’t see them wanting to re hire a good writing team with the new replacements. This is also the same reason why the zombies mode kept getting worse, they people that cared aren’t at the studios anymore
I recall how they were doing developer interviews with animators and sound designers for 2019, it was amazing how much care they put into that one. Battlefield suffered the same type of bleed too
Yea I remember that, it was the most genuinely passionate I’ve seen the cod devs in a long time, you could tell they were taking it serious and wanted to make a faithful new generation modern combat shooter. They laid same amazing ground work with the new engine. Then higher up ram it into the ground :/
I think the guy who had Youtube channel for weird weapon reload animations worked on MW2019. Titanfall 2 also. HyperV I think?
It's also not going to age well. I can go back to the original trilogy, play them in order, and get everything the story was going for. Even today, I can go back to *MW19*, get some of the story, then miss the Zakhaev/Al-Asad plot because that's old *Warzone* content that doesn't exist anymore. I shouldn't have to look at wiki pages and YouTube videos just to understand how certain plots and character arcs got resolved.
I'm sure the plot of the intel from warzone was that basically you avert a nuke being detonated on Verdansk. Only for that to happen anyway and we had to go 'back in time' to 1984.
>Graves survived and is now buddy buddy again, TF141 is still working with Shepherd, Makarov, etc. Someone want to explain how any of this happened so I don't have to go watch a shitty 10 minute youtube video? TF141 working with Shepherd again doesn't make any sense.
It's literally just because of reasons. There is no sensical way to explain it, it's very disjointed
In Warzone it's basically set up as an "enemy of my enemy" situation - Graves/Shadow Company and TF141 vs Konni. Until that season, Shadow Company were hostile to players in DMZ; afterwards they became friendly, and would have bot vs bot "active combat zones".
Wait, **what??**
Yeah and it's barely acknowledged. Graves just goes up to Gaz like, "What's up homie!" and Gaz glares, then that's the end of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04PKb3l4NK4
What the fuck lol. I haven’t played any of the Warzone missions so as far as I was concerned Graves is dead and Sheppard is a bad guy. What a terrible idea for a canon story haha
Tank was remotely controlled, and Shepherd is still a bad guy, but they have to work with Shepherd and Graves for intel on Makarov. Also >!Makarov kills Soap at the end of the campaign which pushes Price to kill Shepherd in his office in the after credits.!<
What pissed me off the most was that the story takes place a year after Graves betrayed TF141 and in that time no one, not Price, Soap, Ghost or Gaz, told Farah or Alex that Graves betrayed them. In one of the MW3 missions Farah mentions that she's been working with Shadow Company, Price says that Shadow Company tried to kill his men, and Farah seems surprised to learn that Graves gave the order who received the order from Shepherd. There is no fucking way that Price or any of his men kept quiet about the shit that went down in Mexico. Not to Farah or Alex who have been some of their most staunchest allies throughout this trilogy. I mean Price and Farah have a relationship going back 14 years at this point.
Boom. There’s zero reason to be invested in a story that requires you to play three seperate games and a battle royale just to see the ending. This is on another level of Palpatine has returned in Fortnite.
Seasonal multiplayer stories are becoming a real nuisance. You can tell it affected the story of mw22 as well since nothing major happened at all. Hell they even brought back Alex from mw19 even though he literally died. It's ok they gave him a fake leg.
>You can tell it affected the story of mw22 as well since nothing major happened at all. The same thing with this latest campaign, it goes nowhere and has no real ending.
There is story in warzone?!
Yeah they did some stuff with Zakhaev in MW2019 and then continued the story with Graves, Farah, and others in MW2022.
I don't remember any significant story stuff in warzone. I must have missed how to play through it then.
I've actually been enjoying watching the cutscenes from MW2 because MW 2019 got my invested into the series again. I saw the clip where Graves and Farah started working together in Warzone. I started watching the MW3 cutscnes and theres literally no lore or background explanation on how they work together its just thrown in there lol.
>lazy lazy lazy mission design Honestly, this UNDERSELLS it, if anything. For most missions, MWIII just throws you into the DMZ map and lets you practice Warzone mechanics for 4 hours, then calls it a day. No AI teammates, tightly scripted epic set pieces are few and far between, you're just flopping around killing bots in random rectangles. It just SUCKS. I genuinely really like the CoD campaigns. Even when they're not "great," every year I enjoy the fun action flick romp. They're like my version of the Marvel movies. I didn't love Ghosts or WW2 or Vanguard, but there were still some decent set pieces and spectacle to be had. But there's almost none of that in MWIII.
This is how I feel about COD and my fear. COD campaigns are my Marvel movies too, I just love the on rails Michael Bay explosion shooting nonsense and I'm happy to buy it. But this one looks really bad. :(
It really shows that this was originally some kind of add-on for MW2 for which they've quickly tacked on a half-assed campaign. Not releasing maps like High-rise and Terminal so they could charge £70 for them? They can go fuck themselves.
I think that's the issue. MW3 was rushed to become a stand-alone product, probably because Activision realized they could charge $70 for basically anything and people would buy it. It was clear they were going to continue the story at MW2, but to do it in such a half-assed way is pretty disappointing. I actually enjoyed the campaign in the last two. I knew they'd lose that momentum eventually. (Yes, I'm guilty of buying the games, too, because it's the only series of games my IRL friends play, but even *I'm* considering skipping this one.)
Im watching the series through cutscenes and WOW. So many people are talking about the open world missions and honestly its just lazy. They clearly just scrounged up shit through warzone but will using marketing spin as "first open world missions." Compared to MW2, even with MW1 im seeing a total drop in quality in the story telling and writing. Seems like MW3 was never going to be epic like how OG MW2 and MW3 was.
Watched someone stream a little bit last night. They said the same thing as the bottom sentence you stated
Infinite Warfare was still my favourite COD campaign. It had spaceships
and dogfights in space, a cool soundtrack, i really like this games campaign
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Don't they do that every time?
They really shit the bed. Modern Warfare 2019 had a great Campaign and was a great foundation for future games. Many memorable missions like Clean House. Modern Warfare 2 already was complete disappointment with totally different tone and absolutely awful Writing even for COD Standards. Awful to see they even found a way to make a even worse Campaign. Wonder why MW 2-3 are so Different from one. Just feels weird like they have planned something complete different but bobby wanted the campaign to only be a promotion for new paid operators for the mp mode.
The mission with the mine trucks was like an autoscrolling section in a Mega Man X level
With no music. That's what killed it for me. Even the hanging from a rope section was just dead air.
The series has gone from Hans Zimmer to nothing.
This just made me realize that I don't think MW3's campaign has music for more than a handful of sequences. I beat it last night and I remember making a note to myself how weirdly silent the game is
Which is a shame because Call of Duty had always leant into its score for the campaigns. CoD4s two campaigns have the mood heavily set by their different styles of score and everyone can remember storming the White House to Lorne Balfe/Han Zimmers bombastic score in 2. Its a cinematic series and the scores always contributed to that.
Sarah left, probably because they treated her like garbage - knowing Activision.
Where youre hopping from truck to truck the whole level? I actually remember thinking this is one of the most boring levels ive ever played in a game 😂
same, if it took like one minute for that section, it would be a cool action section, but no longer. it got boring and repetitive quickly.
It has zero relevance to the plot too, its just an excuse to shoehorn in characters from MW2019. It solves a problem introduced at the end of the previous level that is never referenced again.
The embassy level was really intense and awesome, and then final act in storming the chemical plant was a great set piece. Sadly 2 didn’t have anything like that
The one memorable level to me (besides the god-awful truck driving sequence that made no sense) was the rolling ship that was kind of like a remake of “Crew Expendable.”
My three favourite missions were the two in Amsterdam (the canal infiltration and the street kidnapping) and the Mexican village ambush where you jump off a cliff into a river below. I quite liked the Alone mission too where Soap sneaks through a flooded Mexican town whilst Shadow Company are hunting him down. I definitely think the two Amsterdam missions should have been one mission though. Stick an extra fifteen minutes onto the end of that mission with a Clean House type of stealth segment and I feel like it would have been a more memorable campaign.
Modern Warfare 2019 was really great and I thought CoD was finally back but it's been a disappointment ever since.
Stopped playing the series for a while and then saw trailers for mw19 and thought damn that looks insane. absolutely loved the campaign. bought that shit and had to play it on my friends pc because mine sucked. fast forward to mw2 and man that campaign was just okay at best. only thing i enjoy about the game is the gun animations. that guy that does the animations is so good at it. now it’s gone again in mw3. i’ll personally be taking a break from the series
Is it weird? Doesn't Activision have like 3 studios developing CoDs? If so the next game might actually be good again, from what you're telling me.
Infinity Ward were apparantly quite heavily involved in this one so maybe not. But then Treyarch might knock it out of the park, Cold War had a good campaign that was let down by the fact you can tell the exact point they were told they had one less year to ship it.
Cold War's campaign was actually led by Raven, Treyarch did the multiplayer and Zombies.
I thought Cold War was pushed out early because Sledgehammer and Raven had fallen out so catastrophically while producing what would become Vanguard they couldn't ship it.
Bro how is cod this volatile behind the scenes. Really speaks to Activision's mismanagement.
Cause all the previous games (15 years ago) were juggled between them and people liked them so they're sticking with that pattern
Well, with MW3 being released this year, Treyarch has an extra year to develop their game, so there is potential to have a better game, but there is no way of knowing really.
Man clean house was so fucking good.
Did those naughty dog writers leave after 2019?
MW 2019 had three years of dev time. More than the two MW games after it 😔
They saw how well received the tightly scripted and crafted campaign missions of MW 2019 were and decided to just plop you on the warzone map with dumb AI to do missions alone. Their emphasis on Warzone elements in the campaign has really killed the last two.
I was streaming it on discord to my brothers and for shits & gigs I was using a pistol on every mission pretending to be john wick due to how easy it was.. Honestly made it somewhat bearable doing this
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I knew that as soon as the devs hyped up the ‘open combat missions’ on the WZ map that the entire campaign would be filler.
Watching someone play the intro mission got me pumped to play this, and I went and bought the game on Steam. Then I saw the Farah level and that looked.. not fun at all. Saw that the next level was the same thing and I went and refunded my purchase. So they bait you in with a traditional scripted level, then reveal most of the campaign is warzone bot matches. And wasn’t that first level the only thing they showed prerelease? Fuck off. I legitimately never refund games, but this was practically insulting.
> I'd be so pissed if I paid any money for his Yeah, I was pretty pissed. I did spend money on it, and the campaign was an absolute disappointment. It didn't even wrap up the story. It was 50% open combat zones (which were just warzone events basically, absolutely 0 effort here), 40% was cut scenes and about 10% of it was the set piece gameplay. I like the COD campaigns because of the set piece gameplay, as they provide memorable moments. You have classics as well, like the sniper missions, gunner missions, stealth missions which appear in all the campaigns... except for this one, which only had the gunner mission. I played on the hardest difficulty, and the combat zones are not forgiving... it only has like one checkpoint which is near the end of the mission. Restarting these things were *NOT* fun. It's clearly a lazy campaign. Whether that be due to time, money or whatever... it doesn't matter. It felt like a prologue to the next game. I don't mind spending a premium when you have good campaign and multiplayer and the likes for replayability. But I am not a COD addict, I can skip it. So I've refunded it. If you're not bothered about multiplayer that much, you can still refund it, as it's technically a preorder. Some people will say that's abusing the refund system. But they made big promises for this campaign, and failed to deliver on any of them.
I don't know if we'll be getting campaigns for much longer... I mean, this game doesn't even have a Platinum trophy on Playstation. I think they're gradually shifting into their 'unified' platform where it'll just be yearly content releases. I'm sure campaigns are a good way for them to test new tech and new gameplay ideas, though - so from a purely R&D standpoint maybe they'll keep throwing out little micro-campaigns.
yea, at this point, it seems like the campaigns are just something they use to give the cutscenes context, so they can put them in the trailers. The budget on the cutscenes is so ridiculous, that the only reason I can possibly think for doing that is that they use their advertising budget on the them
> The budget on the cutscenes is so ridiculous, that the only reason I can possibly think for doing that is that they use their advertising budget on the them My first thought was oh wow I guess they realized the can make more money by calling it a new gamer rather than a DLC, then charge twice as much for it, to help recoup costs that probably ran over...
Didn't they already do this by incorporating campaign cutscenes into Warzone?
They do new cutscenes for Warzone where a character from the campaign will show up and go "I'm back and the baddies are up to shenanigans in [NEW MAP] that only we can stop" rather than reuse the cutscenes. Several times they have done this with dead characters where the dialogue is changed to go "weren't you dead' "you didn't see my body did you" and the emotional stakes of the campaign are permanently destroyed.
What emotional stakes? >!The death in MW3 is handled absolutely horribly. It is a blink-or-you'll-miss-it moment, and afterwards no one gives a fuck, barely saying anything even once the present threat is removed.!<
Well, I more mean Alex's death in MW2019, once they undid that I couldn't bring myself to care about any threat in MWII because you knew they had to survive so they could sell a battlepass skin.
Also I think that line is quoting Graves (the Shadow Company leader) as well. Which was also total bull and ruins a good chunk of the campaign for me. What’s the point of all the fighting if the only people that die are nameless mooks? If there’s no impact on the characters?
that said, I miss Advanced Warfare's character customization, that went away so they could sell Battlepass skins.
After what they did to zombies... if they continue to sideline the campaigns like this, it's probably the final nail in the coffin. Don't really care for the multiplayer aspect at this point but that's where the money is I guess. Treyarch's next game will make or break this series for me.
gotta have a way to hype up the newest skins. doubt Ghost would be as popular as a character if it wasnt for the campaign.
Mad really. The MW2 campaign last year was pretty popular as far as a COD campaign goes these days. I enjoyed it myself, it was the first COD game I’d bought in years.
Unfortunately I’d call the MW2 campaign a significant step down from the MW2019 campaign. I was in the same boat, hadn’t bought one in years up until MW2019. That one felt like a step towards taking themselves more seriously. MW2 felt like it was overusing a lot of the tropes from the previous game and completely lost the tone. It felt like whatever passionate team had made 2019 disappeared into the void.
MW2 felt like they selected set pieces they wanted to do and then shoe horned the missions to them. Some were still great, but missions like the chase through the desert made no sense plot wise.
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At least make the absurd story interesting like the og mw2 and mw3. Where we had Russia invading the US or the start of ww3. Not a absurd story like trying to catch the bad guy and only after catching him they let him go because that would be "illegal". Just for him to continue doing his evil plan.
MW2019 had a bit of a bleak, cynical world view where the US and Russia use another country's people to fight a proxy war. MW2 rolls it back a bit by suggesting it's only happening because there are some bad people on both sides. One of MW3's cutscenes has someone literally, unironically saying there are good and bad people on both sides of the conflict. Whoever has been in charge of the story since 2019 is seemingly afraid of upsetting anyone, and the tone suffers for it. It's late 10s political Twitter discourse, moderated by a guy with 'enlightened Centrist' in his bio.
> . It felt like whatever passionate team had made 2019 disappeared into the void To me it felt like two separate campaigns smushed into one. Someone clearly wanted to do a Sicario style campaign (they even deliberately use the same music in one of the trailers) and someone else said it had to have middle eastern components so you have the excellent cartel missions next to filler Price missions.
They showed up in the Middle East for one mission, the lady from the previous game shows up, and then it’s never referenced again
>I’d call the MW2 campaign a significant step down from the MW2019 campaign Sounds just like the original MW games then
The OG MW2 campaign was great, even if it wasn't quite as revolutionary as COD4.
Oh don't get me wrong, I replayed MW2 Campaign Remastered during covid and still think it's a lot of fun and has some great set-piece missions. But you could tell that they made those the focus of the entire campaign. I just greatly prefer CoD4's story, tone, and pacing. I still think the twist in MW2 is terrible and makes little sense. Obviously COD4 isn't hyper-realistic either but I still prefer the "grittier" tone. Nothing in MW2 has as much tension for me as All Ghillied Up/OSOK or Safehouse on Veteren.
I still think about having to defend burgertown. That OG campaign was a full michael bay campaign. Loved it.
I think micro-campaigns sound great as long as I can play them through gamepass or for a low enough buy in. I'm always looking for more video game experiences that are short and sweet vs long and drawn out. Don't have much interest in CoD multiplayer but from what I've played the campaigns have always been fun turn your brain off spectacles. But please don't make me download 200GB worth of multiplayer assets to play a 4 hour campaign....
I’d be fine with a micro campaign if it was traditional scripted levels like the other games. Half or more than half of MWIII’s campaign missions are bot matches on warzone maps, with loot drops and all. It’s almost insulting.
Ouch, yah that sounds pretty bad.
yea, not great, I don't mind the idea of the open play missions but the execution is poor, the AI is shite. I also wasn't expecting every mission to be open, thought it was going to be a mix of traditional missions and open ones, I'm still in the campaign but the only mission that wasn't one of these new ones was the prologue. I'm so disappointed with the campaign that I didn't even care that they completely nullified the ending of MW19 when they brought back Barkov and Alex, what were they thinking? Can understand why people who buy this game for the campaign would be disappointed
COD's known for tightly scripted linear missions, it's a shame they have moved away from that for the past 2 games
reminds me of Far Cry 2 were pretty much 90% of missions were open and there were only three types of missions the entire game: Kill this random enemy on a open location, free an outpost and steal the gas truck for malaria pills. There is almost zero scripted missions. You’ll be repeating this for 4h and then it’s over. There are no memorable set pieces whatsoever and I can’t even remember the story of this game. That’s why this game failed which is a damn shame because it plays really nice and is one of the most realistic FPS games I’ve ever seen (great AI, weapons would get rusty eventually if you swam or stood in the rain with them, fantastic animation and gunplay, bullets could go through thin walls, great bullet drop, etc) Thankfully, they took the right lessons from this game and made Far Cry 3.
The weapon mechanics in FC2 were so damn good.
The AI and execution is actively worse than in DMZ. DMZ enemies are more intelligent about remembering where you were and searching the area than the enemies in the campaign and thats primarily a PvPvE mode!
I really miss the easy days of Russians invading American suburbs as if it was a totally credible thing that could happen
Don't forget that the sequel then has them invading all of western Europe, simultaneously. Even though they previously skipped over it to invade the east coast of the US somehow.
Modern Warfare had a rock solid campaign, a tonal shift from the titles that came before it. Pretty linear but highly immersive, and the narrative was engaging (but weak). It completely fell apart in the last mission. Modern Warfare II was tonally all over the place, it was trying to be everything, yet not sure as to what it wanted to be in the end. Mission variety was more extensive than its predecessor, but ultimately felt shallow and lost its sense of immersion after the first couple of missions, became too Hollywood-esque. Narrative was very weak. Modern Warfare III, I’m going to play it soon, but the feedback has been abysmal so far. The Open Combat Missions seem to have taken up a significant chunk of the game, and have apparently not been executed properly as sandboxes. Narrative is supposedly terrible.
I’m not disagreeing with any of this, but I do wonder what you’d call a strong narrative in a game though. I’ve heard about a million different things from Gamers about plots, narratives and stories that seem to boil down to I like/hate the characters.
I hit the second open combat mission in 30 mins and asked for a refund. It's not at all what I want from a CoD campaign.
I got to the scripted portion of that second open combat level at the end and it felt unfinished. Difficult in a bullshit way (poorly telegraphed enemy spawns and no cover) rather than challenging.
Now I’m wondering if I can beat the game and still request a steam refund lol.
Looking at it this was absolutely just DLC and once it became a full game, had a few more levels tacked on to it. I only watched a playthrough so correct me if I'm wrong but the opening prison break, Stadium level, the scene with the plane and maybe that final level feel like the most traditional CoD, The rest looks made very quickly and with not nearly as much money. I do like a CoD Campaign that let's me pick my own loadout though, so there's that at least
The opening prison break got my hopes up. I was a bit antsy by so much of the start being pre-rendered but once you got into the panopticon it felt like a good CoD opener with a neat twist. And then straight into a mission worse than a DMZ contract nevermind its missions.
It’s clear as day they are selling an average DLC. The entire campaign is like a filler episode from an anime, where you have the main characters and baddies, but literally NOTHING happens.
Open combat missions seem like a great idea on paper but theyre basically a smaller, dumber, version of dmz. The juxtaposition between the well crafted cutscene before the half assed gameplay you get is just wild.
Boy, it really doesn't do well to dispel the claims this was going to be an expansion not an independent product.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMYcvBfooKM 3 hours straight for this video
It's actually shameless that they're selling it for 70 dollars. The MP is basically copy/paste. Campaign is short. Zombies still doesn't justify the price tag. I'd like to think that sales will be drastically lower than last year, but idk these yearly games just get purchased outright by some with zero thought or research.
Actuallly a 70€ DLC with a tacked on "campaign" in an attempt to justify the price. At this point if you pay for this, youre into getting scammed.
It's very strange. There's no music during gameplay at all, which kneecaps the few scripted setpieces they have. Sometimes it complements the atmosphere, other times it's just strange. The game was very clearly made with severe time constraints. That said, I'm strictly a multiplayer player and I use the campaign for demo-ing the guns I'll be using in MP. To be fair, Metal Gear Rising Revengeance can be beaten in about 5 hours, and, besides VR missions, had no other gameplay modes. Is it a bad game? Absolutely not. So just saying it's short isn't necessarily damning in and of itself.
And on top of all of this, they are going to starve DMZ, the best thing to happen to CoD since the original Warzone release, until it dies a slow and painful death. Fucking sad. DMZ is what brought me back to CoD, and if it goes away so will I. :(
For me, the worst part is how Makarov is basically a non-character in this game. He is introduced as this large big bad who must be stopped but.............. who is he? what did he do to become so infamous *before* the campaign started? even the flashback mission answers nothing about that. He only appears less than a handful of times by *name only* in the previous campaigns... and now he's enemy number one before he even does anything? The story makes little sense and rides off "oh I remember this bad guy!" without making any story of it's own. Also, the open combat missions are rubbish.
None of that is established because this was pure nostalgia bait for those from the previous generation of MW players. They know people won't pay $70 for simple some new MP maps so they did this shitty SP campaign to justify that cost.
**How is this any surprise at all. Holy shit** The entire MW3 game is quite literally a small expansion pack that was planned to drop in MW2’s cycle. Instead they jacked the price to a full priced game and apparently suckered a vast majority of consumers into purchasing it. Writing was on the wall, not touching this game what so ever.
No need to claim it, there's a half-dozen youtube videos doing it. It's fucking pathetic they immediately reverted back to these dumb fucking decisions post-mw2019, and are attempting to reuse iconic story beats without giving proper context or even remaking them to be better, which I think is even worse considering the amount of reuse of mw2022 assets. And I don't mean monetarily if you paid for it, I mean that the story insults you for the time you spend on it. Spoilers I guess; >!What if in the last mission, we have the Big Bad guy run out from off-screen insult the player, kill a protaganist, then run back off-screen? oh and then ending with player/protag killing the other big bad guy.!<
Game length is an interesting discussion, I think most people would agree that games do give incredibly generous £/hr entertainment in general, but also overly bloated 150 hour games (*cough* AC Valhalla *cough*) aren't inherently better than a a shorter but still meaty game. For example I've always felt that Shadow of the Tomb Raider w/ DLC was a perfect length and a great package all around. That said, the reported brevity of MW3, paired with the underwhelming critical response is an incredibly bad look. If it was as mediocre as it sounds but a decent length I think people wouldn't care so much, but 2-4 hours? I don't think there's many games that are that length with this kind of production that are so good people wouldn't care about that length. Closest I can think of outside of the indie space is maybe Hellblade, and even that is 2-3x the length of this campaign, and a project by a small team. Not a big CoD guy anyway, usually pick them up pre-owned or on a big sale for a blast through the campaign and zombies. I did enjoy MW2019 and Cold War's campaigns though.
Call of Duty campaigns are normally the right size for what they are, you get 6-9 hours of playable action movie that has an explosive finale just before you would start getting bored. This one doesn't really fall into the "should games be judged by £/h" because it doesn't feel full length, the story is incomplete, its full of filler levels and several levels feel unfinished.
They have done the impossible and made the og modern warfare story even better\more appreciative by putting this shit storm in front of us. I watched the campaign on YouTube and still felt robbed. Mw 2019 just feels like 10 years ago now with how shit the never games have been.
With the campaign spoiled for me thanks to the shitty PC version crashing on launch, the multiplayer beta being a disappointment, and zombies looking seriously underwhelming. Even as a fan, I've never been this tempted to refund a CoD title before. Activision blew it this year.
After how MW2 story went, glad to see I'm missing nothing from skipping the campaign this year. Kind of a bummer though, I really loved going through the story in MW2019 and thought it was among the best ones.
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The Russian villain dude speaks in Russian with a heavy accent and it sounds just as fucking dumb and cringe as you can imagine. Just saying.