Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3’s campaign has received scathing reviews. Above all, many people criticize the small size. Well-known industry insider Jason Schreier spoke to Sledgehammer Games employees and reveals what went wrong during the game’s development.
What’s the problem with the campaign?
The first test ratings also indicate that the MW 3 campaign was a mess. On Opencritic, the shooter currently has a rating of 53 out of 100 possible points. Our colleagues from GameStar and GamePro also have scathing judgments for the campaign.
Activision promoted the campaign so beautifully:
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 World Premiere First Level Trailer – Opening Night Live 2023
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Insider report reveals grievances
Why is the campaign so bad? Industry insider Jason Schreier wrote a report on the situation on behalf of the Bloomberg editorial team. He was able to speak to some developers at Sledgehammer Games who expressed their displeasure.
On the one hand, the development time was only half as long as usual. Normally, around three years of development are available for each CoD game. For CoD MW 3 it was only 1.5 years. The reason for this is the fact that MW 3 was designed to fill a gap.
The game was actually presented to the development team as an expansion for MW 2, but only developed into a full sequel months later. Activision denied this to Bloomberg, commenting that MW 3 was a “premium game” from the start.
What is much worse, however, is that crunch is once again the order of the day. Sledgehammer Games was promised when developing CoD Vanguard that it would be the last title they would have to work overtime on. But even at MW 3, night and weekend work was not uncommon.
The story was originally supposed to have a smaller scope and take place in Mexico, but last summer Activision reportedly decided to reboot the story.
The development team would have only had 16 months to put together a complete campaign. Analysts believe this misstep should have no impact on the series.
But analyst Kevin Tsao thinks Microsoft may consider suspending the annual cycle that Call of Duty has had since 2005.
There would have been another problem in communication with Infinity Ward: the development team at Sledgehammer Games would have had to wait a long time for feedback and sometimes make unwanted changes.
It remains to be seen whether CoD MW 3’s multiplayer and zombie modes will also perform as poorly. MeinMMO author Christos is already looking forward to one of the two modes in particular:
I would have ignored CoD: MW3, but one mode is sure to keep me entertained for months