WW2 #30: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
The development was almost more explosive than the game itself
This review was originally posted to Twitter on February 24, 2020.
Initial release: November 8, 2011
Platform: PC, PlayStation 3, XBox 360, Wii
Developer: Infinity Ward/Sledgehammer Games
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a popular series to churn out a sequel, a decent respect to developers requires that the publisher not shit the bed with the lights on. And boy, did Activision ever drop a big ol’ pantsfiller during the development of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
The Modern Warfare series was plagued with interference from Activision from the start. Call of Duty 2 only exists because Activision demanded it before Infinity Ward were allowed to work on Modern Warfare, then they demanded a Modern Warfare sequel instead of what would eventually become Infinite Warfare. For Modern Warfare 3, you may have noticed that there’s two studios listed as the developer. This is because Activision triggered a mass exodus from Infinity Ward after they fired the company’s co-founders, forcing Activision to bring in Sledgehammer Games to fill in the ranks. Jason West and Vince Zampella, the company’s founders, had demanded big bonuses and creative control in exchange for doing Modern Warfare 2, but Activision snuck in a clause that said that if West and Zampella were ever fired, creative control went back to Activison. Guess what happened next?
After the mass walkout, and Sledgehammer being brought on board (with habitual id Software hangers-on Raven Software doing the multiplayer) the end result is an engaging, but uneven game that brings nothing new to the franchise, with a campaign that adds very little to the story.
Alien, Star Wars, Robocop — there’s a long-standing notion that trilogies are cursed to have substandard third acts. The same applies to video games, and perhaps to Modern Warfare in particular. That’s not to say that Modern Warfare 3 is bad — but it’s a bad case of a two-part trilogy. Modern Warfare 2 was never really supposed to exist in the first place; that it ended on a cliffhanger feels a bit like salt in the wound, necessitating a third game. But all the third game does is reiterate Modern Warfare. Everything seems familiar, including all the twists. It starts off with a battle in New York City with some familiar imagery; from there we get a rehash of Modern Warfare 1's bonus airplane mission, a Blackhawk Down reference in Somalia, a cute little family vacation video witnessing a terrorist attack, and a final confrontation that evokes “No Russian,” but without the civilian casualties.
None of what happens in this game really matters. It’s a denouement at best. Somehow they find a way to move the war from America to Europe (and thus trigger a non-nuclear World War III) but it’s still the same old shit. The quest to find the lead villain is successful. Whatever. There’s nothing really wrong with it, though the two missions in Africa have me going “hmm” — but then, Africa is rarely depicted decently in games like this. Halo 2, maybe. It just feels like it’s going through the motions, incapable of really reaching the highs of Modern Warfare 2. It’s hard to really say who’s to blame for it. Could the mass walkout of employees have something to do with it? Or was the game creatively sterile from the get-go? After Treyarch’s smash hit Black Ops the previous year it had some pretty big shoes to fill, too, and it simply couldn’t.
Ultimately it’s not a bad game. Despite the troubled development, this is a solid shooter with some really nice technical wizardry (the graphics are amazing by 2011 standards and a helicopter fight in Manhattan is especially dazzling.) But at the end of the day this is a game you get only if you really liked Modern Warfare 2 and wanted to finish the story. Other than that, it’s little more than an expansion pack to a game that maybe didn’t really need one.
