The past two weeks have not been kind to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. While those that have enjoyed the past two reboot Modern Warfare got excited when the team behind the game shared the classic maps making a comeback, that was immediately dashed when it was announced that the whole game would require 213 GB of SSD storage.

Yup, 213GB. Now, there are a LOT of caveats to that figure. If all you want to do is play the multiplayer version and you don't have a device or platform capable of playing the game with "high resolution visuals" or that's something you do not value for the sake of storage space, you can lower the amount of storage space Modern Warfare takes up to 79 GB. Add the single-player campaign sans high resolution 4K graphics and that immediately bumps things up to 149GB. Now, given how the campaign is reviewing and the fact that it is apparently south of five hours, that's absurd. Also, it is utterly bizarre that there's 2 levels of 'high resolution textures' at 32 GB and 64 GB each.

And maybe you shouldn't download or pay for that campaign as early reviews of it are coming in almost universally negative. Not only are some publications saying it tops out at around three to four hours, but also that it is graphically uneven and unimpressive as well as being unwilling or unable to do anything to deviate from the mission design and structure of the past two Modern Warfare campaigns. The vast majority of the missions follow a new "Open Combat" format in which you have multiple mission objectives that you can tackle in whatever order you like, almost like the mission is a Warzone map. With the Call of Duty franchise predicating a lot on tightly paced scripted missions, this sounds like a terrible way to attempt a course correction with the franchise's waning single player campaign relevance.

And to make matter worse, launching the game seems to be a complete chore. PC Gamer reports that even after they uninstalled the campaign, not only did it take them on average 70 to 90 seconds to load the game, and that's because you can't launch Modern Warfare 3 without first launching Modern Warfare 2. Call of Duty HQ is essentially a repackaged version of the Modern Warfare 2/Warzone client, and you have to run it every time you want to run Modern Warfare 3.

But hey, at least the classic Call of Duty maps they announced earlier sound like ones you would like to play.

I played through the campaign last night.

It was a fairly bog standard campaign as Modern Warfare goes. I don't really care about the length of the campaign... 5 hours ish is about as much as I want to spend on that anyway. The story is whatever, and it really does feel like they do the campaign now just to tick a box.

The real failure for me is that the new open combat style missions did not do anything exciting with the new format and went nowhere near far enough. My first thought when I heard about these initially was that they might finally make the campaign co-op, and give the players some large sandbox areas to go wild in. Instead it's just running around fighting more or less the exact same dudes every time, completing fairly boring objectives before exfil. Nothing new or interesting really. A missed opportunity.

I'm not all that bothered tho in fairness, I play cod for the mulitplayer and I am looking forward to that. I also belive they are mixing up zombies mode this time around? Making it more open-world? Zombies was always a brick wall for me, whenever I tried it I never knew what the fuck was happening. This was also obvious to whoever was on my team becuase once they saw my confusion they would just quit. After four or five times I just never played

Zombies again. Here's hoping this time around it's something I can get into.

This should not have been a full priced game, but a DLC add on for maybe 20$ at most, if not for free. This was a greedy move by Activation and it shows. But the sad thing is, a lot of CoD freaks will spend the money anyway, so this nonsense will continue. Just like with the annual sports games that add hardly anything new except more and more ways to nickel and dime its players. The players still spend tons of money instead of taking a stand.

Ultimately, you can't blame these video game developers for their practices, when it works and makes them tons of bank.

I don't play these games but I'm very curious to see what the reviews are when the multiplayer is taken into consideration. I think it's a pretty big statement game as it's the first COD to launch as a Microsoft title. And that it was going to be a Microsoft, not an Activision title from early on in the development could mean that Activision cared even less than they normally do.

It's almost like it was an expansion turned into a "full" game at the last minute. I wonder how many assets it would entirely share with MW2 that would cut down that install size.

As for the campaign, that's a shame, it sounds like it could have been something similar to Medal of Honor; Airborne, which actually has a really cool campaign

I have the free MW2 client on my PS5 and it tried downloading MW3 (which I have no intention of buying), all 150+ Gigs of it. What the heck is CoD these days? I only have the client so I can play Warzone with relatives who are inte this franchise, but that bloated client is an eyesore and a usability problem.

@theonewhoplays: on the bright side, if you ever do buy MW3 all you'll need to download is like a 43kB unlock code or something?

Seriously, wow, what a hot mess.

@theonewhoplays: The same happened to me. It tried to update MWII to MWIII and failed because I needed to free up over 100GBs of space. I just had the MWII multiplayer installed at the time so I can play 24/7 Shipment when I'm in the mood. I ended up uninstalling MWII and reinstalling it again with just the multiplayer and it worked, or at least it seemed to.

I'm not the target audience, but as someone that primarily plays on his Xbox Series S, the 213 gigs part seems INSANE to me.

I don't care about CoD, I just want to say that the naming convention for these games is dumb. I feel like in 10-20 years we are going to having three more games with exactly the same names. It's like marketing people are terrified of numbers higher than 3.

@wollywoo: In a lot of cases I agree, but these games are remakes. There's a Black Ops 4 so it's not like 3 is the hard cap. They just remade this trilogy because COD4: MW was the genre breakout game.

I'm not saying it's not creatively bankrupt, but remakes often get the same name as the original game.

Metacritic trying to keep the bad scores under wraps. But the thumbnail border knows....

OK but from the reviews it seems very different from the original with its new "open combat". I guess it's a remake in plot only? And yeah I know there was COD4 originally, I was being a bit facetious. The naming is even more ridiculous when you take that into account. Like it should be Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare: Modern Warfare 3. Or, something.

As much as I want this Hot Mess to challenge the Unity vs Embracer hegemony for 2023, I know this quarter-assed effort is going to outsell my entire GOTY list combined. Still, I can point and laugh at many aspects of this situation, and isn’t that what really matters? The answer is no.

This game coming out and being this big of a mess feels like the perfect swan song to the Kotick era of Activision. A company that large that went from having a diverse catalog of games to putting out basically one thing a year and yet somehow they can't be bothered to even get that one thing they have left to do right seems like the perfect summary of Kotick's tenure, and really modern big business in general.

@ben_h: I don't think "can't even be bothered" is the right way to put it. It's more that they buckled under the impossibility of putting out yearly iterations of a AAA game. They tried throwing more teams at it, and reusing parts of older games, but ultimately these things are just too big to put out every year without delay. Delays are necessary in the gaming industry and Activision put everything on not having them, and it will destroy the franchise.

The other big publisher that tried annualization was Ubisoft and they gave it up after a time but it has still left them in a very dysfunctional state.

Call of Duty is not ALL Activision does (Diablo IV also launched this year) but it's the mainstay and they need it to happen every year, but when you try that this is what you get, eventually.

@wollywoo: It's a remake with substantial differences, yes, but that's not uncommon. Look at the Pac-Man World RePack, or obviously Final Fantasy VII Remake or the Resident Evil remakes. There are lots of reasons to criticize COD but how is Modern Warfare III much worse in terms of name than Resident Evil 4?

Oh, I'm well aware of Blizzard. I was talking about games Activision themselves publish. For the past few years it's been literally just Call of Duty and maybe one token smaller project (this year it was that Crash Mario Party-ish game. Prior to that was Crash 4 and Tony Hawk 1 + 2 in 2020). Back 10-15 years ago they had several major franchises alongside a bunch of minor games they published with some regularity).

But yes, it seems like they haven't accepted what basically everyone else has which is that large scale annual games outside of sports franchises are not sustainable long term and that by putting out mediocre products every other release instead of taking a year to truly get the game up to par they're burning a lot of good will from the people who buy their games annually. Activision themselves should have learned this after what happened with Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero, two franchises they demanded be annual and eventually drove into the ground as a result (In those cases, both fans of the franchises and the studios making the games had publicly said that they would love a year off so they could put in actual meaningful changes and polish but Activision never relented).

They're incredibly lucky that Call of Duty's popularity has sustained as long as it has. There's been several points where it's looked like Call of Duty was going to go the way of Guitar Hero and have its popularity collapse after one too many mediocre games, but so far it always has bounced back. Had the Microsoft deal fell through, Activision could potentially have been in big trouble in the near future since they've had all their eggs in one basket for almost four years now. Combine that with them sacrificing the few remaining non-content mill studios they had left (e.g. Vicarious Visions) to try to put out the colossal tire fire at Blizzard and they would be in a rough spot.

@ben_h: COD is two decades old at this point and has been the best selling game every year for most of its life, Modern Warfare 2019 being a series high in terms of engagement and sales which is a scary thought.

When COD starts to decline I doubt it would be sudden like Guitar Hero, more likely it'll be gradual like wow.

Its also worth noting today's gaming landscape is also very different, every year is someones first console/pc and these long standing franchises can always feed new people in, its why GTAV is still going a decade later.

How long have people been saying its not sustainable yet here we are, ABK have 10b+ in the bank. If COD died surely the people behind the best selling franchise of the past two decades could come up with something else, probably COD like.

@bigsocrates: Fair enough I suppose. I don't really follow these games so I was assuming it was more of a God of War (2005) -> God of War (2018) sequel situation than a Resident Evil 4 (2004) -> Resident Evil 4 (2022) remake type deal.

Time to get John Haloman in there to save the day!

According to news reports: Activision ONLY gave Sledgehammer 16 months (1/2 the normal dev time) to make this "game," which meant A LOT OF CRUNCH (nights and weekends) for the devs at Sledgehammer, something (lying) Activision execs told them they'd never have to do... from the last time they made Sledge crunch on a CoD game.

@nameredacted: That's what Bloomberg reported also, however Sledgehammer Games responded by claiming the game was in development for "years".

... Which i'm not sure they should be admitting, we were blaming Activision for not giving them enough time, but they're saying they had years to put together what many are calling the worst release of a Call of Duty game ever.

@cikame: They're "admitting" it because the Activision brass wants them to, not because they're trying to get the truth out there. The only thing more sacrosanct in corporations than covering your own ass is covering your boss's ass. You take your lumps and you take his lumps and you hope that he remembers it when it comes time for evaluations and raises (he won't.)

It's also probably true in a strict sense. "This wasn't in development for 16 months. Why Jimmy, Joe, and Martha started sketching out concept art for it a full three years ago!"

"In development" can mean a lot of things.