Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Players Have Harsh Words for "Awful" Campaign

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's campaign attracts heavy criticism.

Activision made Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's campaign playable via early access on November 2nd for those who pre-ordered the game, and plenty of players have already beaten the full story. That's because the campaign for the new game is apparently pretty short with some players saying that they finished it in as little as four hours. Length aside, players have had much harsher words for the quality of the campaign overall with critiques of it that have been shared so far calling it "awful" and "the biggest fumble" compared to past Call of Duty games' campaign modes.

Sure enough, if you look up playthroughs of the campaign, you can see that some people are most definitely finishing it within 4 hours, sometimes as quickly as just 3 hours, too. The length is easily one point of concern among players who've gotten to play through the campaign early, but Call of Duty: Warzone-style missions have also been criticized.

How Is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's Campaign?

To see how people are feeling about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's campaign, you don't have to look much further than Call of Duty communities on social media. Take the Call of Duty subreddit, for example, which is currently filled with posts like one highly upvoted one discussing the campaign overall. While the contents of that main post were removed due to an apparent rule violation, the comments that remain on the post make the sentiment clear.

"This was unironically the biggest fumble of what was setup to be a great campaign," reads the top comment on that post. "MW 2019 delivered a phenomenal campaign with an amazing setup for at LEAST a trilogy worth of content. Big L here."

Similar posts lamented the quality of the campaign calling it "so awful" compared to the original Modern Warfare 3 campaign. This new version of the campaign has "Open Combat Missions" which are meant to be more open-ended compared to the straightforward nature of past Call of Duty missions. They're meant to "transcend boundaries, empowering players with diverse strategies to achieve their objectives," according to Activision, but players are calling them lazy interpretations of what a campaign mission should look like.

"It's an uninspired and lazy mess and an excuse to forgo creating well-crafted set pieces and any greater sense of scale," reads one post critiquing the Open Combat Missions. "They just take a map they made for Warzone, drop some stupid AI in the middle, and send you on fetch quests. Basically solo DMZ masquerading as a campaign."

The attention given to the campaign, ironically, is due to the fact that it was playable early in the first place. Had it dropped right when the rest of the game did, there still would've been criticisms, but they likely wouldn't have been as plentiful since players would've had everything else to keep them busy, too.

The rest of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 including the Zombies mode and multiplayer will release on November 10th.