Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3: How to Play Multiplayer Early

If you’re interested in playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3‘s multiplayer a bit early, there’s a couple of ways to do so. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is one of the most anticipated games of 2023 and naturally, fans want to get in on the action as quickly as possible. Timing is everything and getting the upper hand by learning the movement, gun metas, and such will provide players a huge advantage. Even though it’s a matter of hours until the game officially launches worldwide, you can level up quite a bit in that amount of time and get a ton of guns, attachments, and killstreaks in that amount of time. Modern Warfare 3 also uses remastered versions of Modern Warfare 2 (2009)’s maps, but things like spawns and objective locations have changed a bit, so you can also gain an advantage there.

Last week, fans were able to start playing the Modern Warfare 3 campaign early if they pre-ordered the game. Given it’s pretty short, fans blazed through it in a matter of hours and began craving the multiplayer. In just a couple days, you’ll be able to play the entirety of Modern Warfare 3 with no restrictions, but there is a way to get in on the fun a bit early.

How to Play MW3 Early

There are a few ways of playing Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer early. Some are more complicated than others, but we will explain them all here.

The easiest one requires two people. One person already needs to be in Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer, but we were able to get in by joining someone off of our in-game friend’s list without even telling them. Once we were in their lobby, we backed out and were able to find a match by ourselves. We did this on PC, so other platforms may vary for this method. Some have suggested having your friend go into the firing range, inviting you, and then kicking you, and then you should be able to play from there.

If you don’t have a friend with Modern Warfare 3 or need someone to boot into the game, you can do the following methods below.

Xbox users are likely familiar with the tried and true New Zealand trick. This allows you to go into your system settings and change your location to New Zealand so that your console thinks you’re in the correct time zone. Modern Warfare 3 will become playable at 6AM ET on November 9th in New Zealand, so if you’re interested in playing tomorrow, you absolutely can. It should be noted that this is a loophole and could result in some trouble with Xbox, though we’ve never actually seen any cases of that. Do it at your own risk!

If you are on PlayStation 5, you can launch into multiplayer via one of the multiplayer activity cards on the PS5 UI. It should work pretty seamlessly from there. If not, you can try one of the methods above.