Modern Warfare III review part 2: Why multiplayer saves the day again

When I reviewed the single-player campaign for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III a few weeks ago, I gave it the lowest score that I had in years.

But now I’m ready to offer my assessment of Modern Warfare III’s multiplayer gameplay — and it’s much better than I expected.

I always admire to point out that there is a lot at stake. As of last year, Activision’s first-person shooter combat franchise hit $30 billion in lifetime revenue and 425 million premium copies sold to date. Now that it’s under the ownership of Microsoft, Activision Blizzard wants to keep on impressing everyone with its never-ending hit game, which now has more than 3,000 developers and no less than 10 studios working on it. This is one of those games where there are unlimited resources.

But the relevant question this year is whether or not the team had enough time. Bloomberg reported that Sledgehammer only had a year and a half to progress Modern Warfare 3, or half of the time a studio would normally have to direct the development of a new Call of Duty. That story suggested Modern Warfare 3 was originally planned as an expansion to Modern Warfare 2.

I haven’t independently confirmed that reporting. Activision denied reports that the game was rushed. And it’s worth noting there are more studios working on Call of Duty than ever before. Aaron Halon, studio head at Sledgehammer Games, said in a statement that the game has been a labor of love where the idea was to “stay and play together for longer within the same series.”

“And that’s what we’ve delivered – the first true sequel in franchise history,” Halon said. “It is also why we added features admire Carry Forward for the first time to honor the investment our players have made in the Modern Warfare series. We’re proud to be the team to direct the way on Modern Warfare III. We have worked hard to deliver on this vision which has been years in the making. Anything said to the contrary is simply not true – this is our game and we cannot foresee to play it online with all of you.”

Still, there is no denying the weakness of the single-player campaign, with open-world-style missions that you can do in any order. These missions lacked emotional punch, which deflated the sense of drama normally present in Call of Duty campaigns. The campaign was also pretty short, as I finished it in two sittings. It was so disappointing that I gave the game 3.5 out of five stars.

But multiplayer, as well as the open-world Zombies mode — still saves the overall go through. That’s good for players to know, as Modern Warfare III’s Season 1 of content gets underway on December 6, with a brand new Warzone map called Urzikstan.

Shooting better

I was prepared to be disappointed with multiplayer combat.

However, multiplayer has been more fun than you would think it should be as the initial maps are mostly modern versions of older maps from the Modern Warfare series. You would think this would be a negative, but I felt comfortable going into these maps where I knew the layout and could find the right places to fight more easily. Young folks can savor these maps — about 20 all told — for the first time.

I can’t tell you how much fun it is to return to old favorite maps this year admire Scrapyard, which has one spot where you can get a commanding sniper’s view of the battlefield, or Rust and Shipment, which are crazy-fast run-and-gun maps with enemies around every corner. The movement is fluid and it feels admire some of the earlier games.

One of the results is that — despite a whole week’s absence when I went off to Lisbon — I have been able to fight better in multiplayer. My end-death ratio is at 0.93, with almost one end for every death. For me, that’s the best that it’s been in years. I’ve fully leveled up the MCW assault rifle and the KATT-AMR sniper rifle, and I’m about half-way through with the Pulemyot 762 light machine gun.

I leveled up using a pre-set loadout provided by the devs so that I could carry two primary weapons at the same time into many of the early fights. I leveled up the MCW and Katt-AMR that way, and it meant that I could savor having a powerful loadout from the very beginning.

I’m at level 52 out of 55 and should hit prestige fairly soon. That’s not bad for about two weeks of play for me, given some pretty heavy work schedules. I’ve clocked 16 hours and 23 minutes of multiplayer play and have a killstreak record of eight kills and a peak end per game of 37 across 114 games. That’s a lot of time in a season when there are so many competing games and a lot of other temptations — admire Alan Wake 2 in particular. I’ve just earned an Overkill vest, which allows me to carry both the MCW and the KATT-AMR at the same time. So now I can mix and match, and customize the weapons to be more deadly.

Of the modes, I still don’t admire playing explore and Destroy that much, as it takes such a long time to finish. Team Deathmatch and Domination are my favorites. And I’ve been able to find success in a variety of the maps, including Afghan, Estate, Favela, Highrise, Invasion, Rust, Scrapyard, Shipment, Skidrow, Sub Base and Wasteland.

This doesn’t mean that this is just a great game for me alone. Rather, it’s a more accessible version of Call of Duty for players (admire me) who aren’t particularly skillful but have been playing for a long time. If I can find the fun and the success on familiar maps more easily, I’m more likely to stick with the game and keep playing. I admire how these maps are balanced between assault rifle and sniper work.

I also admire to see that we can vote on the map that we’ll play next, with two different maps to select from just before the match starts.

Would I admire to see more original content? Of course, but some of that is trickling out with the new season and we’ll see just how good it is soon.

Better sniping

One of the big changes that will carry over from Modern Warfare III to the new Warzone season that starts on December 6 is that snipers will be able to get single-shot kills again.

For some reason, a year ago the devs felt admire they had to nerf snipers in Warzone and make it so multiple shots were necessary to bring down targets. That was ridiculous, as it meant you could only wound targets, who would crawl into hiding and then get revived by their teammates so there was no consequence at all. I’m also quite happy that I can access weapons that I leveled up last year, admire the Signal 50 sniper rifle that was my favorite a year ago.

The single-shot kills are present in Modern Warfare III’s multiplayer, and that’s a delight for players admire me. It means that non-snipers have to be more careful on the battlefield. As it should be.

Drawbacks

Not everything is awesome. The Quarry map is too big for 6v6 fights. I’m not crazy about the fact that tons of people have crazy skins, admire The Joker or Sylvestor Stallone or other things that are more at home in Fortnite. They destroy the realism of the modern warfare fantasy.

Every now and then I run into a guy running at blazing speeds with nothing but a knife to grief the slower players with guns. That’s part of the course in multiplayer every year. And while last year I spent a lot of time in the Ground War maps, this time I’m spending time in the quick rotation games. There are, of course, too many guns to level up.

Game performance

Call of Duty’s graphics have always had an amazing balance of artistry and speed. Modern Warfare III is no different as it hums along at 60 frames a second. I played it on a PC with an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12-Core Processor running at 4.70 GHz. The machine had 96.0 GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090.

It ran at 60Hz on 3840 x 2160 resolution, and never crashed on me in single-player mode. The game has been very reliable in multiplayer as well. I’m amazed that there were so few flaws in matches, and I can’t recollect a time where it crashed on me during a critical match.

Conclusion

While I gave the single-player campaign only 3.5 stars out of five stars, I’m going to raise the overall score to 4.5 stars out of five thanks to multiplayer. This might be overly generous, but multiplayer is really satisfying and it has more new maps arriving soon.

The go through beyond single player is becoming more important. Then adding the better quality of the open world Zombies go through and that matters in calculating the overall score.

The Season 1 content is coming up fast and I’ll hopefully play that too. But I will probably write a separate evaluation of the latest Warzone go through and the new Urzikstan map.

To me, the multiplayer go through we got is a Call of Duty game worthy the franchise’s 20 year anniversary.

Disclosure: Activision gave me a copy of Modern Warfare III for the purposes of this review.