Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the direct sequel to Modern Warfare 2 (2022) and takes Captain Price and Task Force 141 into battle against a very special villain that even the campaign developers find intimidating.
What kind of villain is this? The main antagonist of Modern Warfare 3 will be the ultranationalist Vladimir Makarov, who many players may already know from previous games and whose return was already teased at the end of Modern Warfare 2 (2022).
In the original MW installments, Makarov was the leader of a terrorist cell that fomented war and hatred and, in Modern Warfare 1 (2007), detonated a nuclear bomb that claimed thousands of lives.
On top of that, Makarov was the linchpin of one of the most famous and controversial missions in the history of CoD: “No Russian”.
What was the “No Russian” mission about?
The mission of MW2, released in 2009, puts the player in the role of CIA agent “Joseph Allen”, who is murdered by Makarov at the end of the mission.
Allen’s goal in “No Russian” was to gain the trust of Makarov, who, with a group of heavily armed terrorists, carried out an attack on a fictional airport in Moscow and killed civilians in order to blame the Americans for the crime.
Makarov’s plan worked and war broke out between Russia and the USA because the Russian authorities believed that the Americans were behind the attack.
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“He’s the villain you love to hate.”
What do the MW3 developers say about Makarov? MeinMMO author Dariusz Müller spoke about Modern Warfare 3’s campaign in an interview with CoD developers Shelby Carleton and Dave Swenson.
In the conversation, Carleton told us what a special feeling it was for her, as an avowed CoD fan, to work on a character like Makarov:
“When I heard that Makarov was going to be our villain, I was overjoyed. On one hand, I thought, how intimidating is this character? He’s so infamous, isn’t he? He is the villain you love to hate in the Call of Duty franchise.”
The performance of actor Julian Kostov, who plays the role of Makarov in MW3, also left a special impression on her:
“It’s difficult to put into words how you feel as a fan of the series when you write the lines for Makarov and then see our amazing actor Julian speak it better and more frighteningly than you ever imagined could imagine in his head.”
What role does Makarov play in MW3? Carleton left no doubt that Makarov will play a central role in MW3’s story.
“Makarov was always somehow the center of attention, and the other conflicts were like spokes of a wheel, arising from Makarov as a person and his actions. So his relationships with all the characters and the conflicts he creates are all incredibly interconnected, and I think that really helped put Makarov at the center of the narrative.”
In the course of our conversation, Carelton explains that the campaign is also about heroes like Price and Farah trying to stop Makarov, but as an antagonist the ultranationalist influences everything else:
“All of these characters are our wonderful protagonists trying to stop him, but as an antagonist he’s definitely…he’s a central role and everything he does has an impact on everything else.”
What else did the developers talk about? In addition to Makarov, a large part of our conversation was about the “open combat missions” that will be introduced to the CoD franchise with MW3 and open up new possibilities for players.
For example, Dave Swenson explained to me how free you really are as a player within these new missions, as I feared that there would only be predetermined paths, such as loud or quiet:
“Very free. So free, in fact, that in our initial testing we invited the multiplayer team to play the campaign, and as we watched them do it, they often did things that we didn’t expect, that we hadn’t even thought about.”
Unfortunately, there will be no option to play these missions in co-op with friends or to create your own sandbox levels and share them with other players, but Swenson still sees a high replay value in the open combat missions.
If you want to read more about Makarov, you can find out more about the villain’s past appearances here: Makarov returns – Who is the “new” villain?