Late title cards are fascinating to me. When and how creators decide to reveal the name of their game or movie tells us a lot about how they view their work and what they want people to notice right away. Thus, the Modern Warfare 3 campaign title card serves a very useful purpose. It provides you with all the information you require about the experience you are going to have.
It falls precisely one minute and twenty-five seconds into the campaign, at the exact moment when a group of soldiers breaks the surface of the water. It arrives so quickly, lands with such little fanfare, and happens after nothing really noteworthy has happened. The game is informing you that it doesn’t really offer anything worthwhile to care about, and it doesn’t even know what to do with what it does offer.
I believe it’s reasonable to bring up Modern Warfare 3’s opening to highlight how much of a divergence it is from Modern Warfare 2’s, as Activision continued to promote it as a direct sequel. Finding and deactivating missiles that had gotten into the wrong hands constituted a large portion of the plot of Medal of Honor 2. Therefore, the game’s opening shows the absolute destruction that can only be done when the “right” hands are involved. It makes sense to roll the title card because the stakes have been set.
To put it plainly, the Modern Warfare 3 campaign aims to pique players’ nostalgia without actually putting in the necessary effort to support it. The two Modern Warfare reboots did not feature Makarov, a recurrent antagonist from the first Modern Warfare trilogy.
However, for some reason, the game wants us to think that in addition to his return, he has always been a villain that Captain Price and company are acquainted with. The missions that follow, many of which are located at different locations on the Verdansk map from the original Warzone, are as follows.
They are occasionally accompanied by straightforward scripting and in-game cutscenes (not the pricy, Blur-produced ones), but they are never a full-fledged spectacle. One of those missions, which takes place at the stadium from the same map, retcons Makarov’s existence.
Reusing existing locations almost always comes across as making the most of what is available, as opposed to recontextualizing a well-known area. Here, Sledgehammer Games has no jealousy. It was asked to make it work after being dealt an unfair hand.
For me, that all reached a breaking point when I encountered the Open Combat Missions. I was actually kind of excited when they were first announced. I believed that Sledgehammer was bringing back some of my favorite Modern Warfare 2 mission types. The missions in that game were never given a name, but they ended up being particularly important in developing the game’s characters in addition to bringing a fresh gameplay mechanic to the series.
The player is granted a certain amount of freedom in how they approach the objectives, but there isn’t really any incentive to get particularly inventive. Finding an Ascender, climbing to a vantage point, grabbing your scope, tagging enemies, and eliminating overwatchers are not necessary. It would be equally simple to enter through the front door of a car, go upstairs, and carry out the deed.
The fact that shooting an isolated target with a suppressed weapon can somehow alert everyone nearby is a testament to the “stealth” system’s poor construction, which doesn’t help. The likelihood that the AI will ignore your next move or send a volley of reinforcements is nearly equal.
The rapport, character banter, and humanity from Medal of Honor 2 are all gone, as are the cleverest systems from that game. Open Combat Missions are merely soulless, bare filler designed to increase the number of hours completed.
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The MO of Modern Warfare 3 is bringing back things we have seen previously. This applies to the campaign in general as well as to the No Russian aspect of this game, not just Makarov specifically. The Modern Warfare 2 post-credit scene laid the groundwork, so it’s not totally out of place. In my opinion, this iteration of No Russian is even more intelligent—that is, less obvious—than the original.
I won’t go into the details here, but even though it turns out to be just another pointless setup for a significant turn that is resolved very quickly, I have to commend it for recognizing the fundamentals of that kind of false flag attack rather than trying to duplicate the same incidents.
It becomes abundantly evident toward the end of the Modern Warfare 3 campaign that certain beats had to be hit and certain conclusions had to be drawn. At that moment, the game abruptly ends its pretense and moves on to the “real” events more quickly than you could fast-forward through an oversized Netflix series.
These days, every mission has to feature the mysterious return of Makarov or the death of a significant character, only for him to vanish once more in a cutscene. You couldn’t help but laugh at some of those situations because they are so absurd.
The competent nature of the Modern Warfare 3 campaign is its strongest suit. Despite lacking any innovative or captivating concepts, the package is well-designed. I encountered a few unremarkable bugs, but the most hilarious one was that the post-credits scene—another significant event that could have been included in the game—did not play for me. Instead, I had to access the Cinematics menu to see if it was there and then play it.
It almost seems as though the game is finished with its own fiction before you are.