Modern Warfare 3’s campaign has finally unmoored Call of Duty

Call of Duty’s single-player campaigns are known for their follow-up gameplay. You usually play as a member of a unit, a detachment, sometimes even an entire ground invasion. Your team is often led by a competent and deadly effective leader. This leader selects which doors to break through, which bad guys to kill in what order, and which paths to follow as they stealthily guide you through enemy bases, surgically eliminating threats and occasionally engaging in larger, bombastic firefights. For most Modern Warfare games in particular, that exceptional father figure was the gruff, walrus-haired Captain Price, the mythological center of the Modern Warfare pantheon.

Modern Warfare 3 marks a shift: a few missions into the game, the camera zooms in on his puffy cheeks and beady eyes as you, for the first time in the series (that’s not a flashback), take control of his bodily form. You are no longer the young know-nothing who passively follows along; now you get to play as Call of Duty’s emotionally unavailable father. But this shift is uncomfortable, and reflects broader ways in which this third installment of the rebooted series begins to take the games off their familiar rails and into strange, unsettling territory.

Not only WHO you act as change Modern Warfare 3, but also how you play it. Much less time is spent in the original linear level structure present in previous games. Much more of it Modern Warfare 3‘S The campaign is spent in what the developers call ‘Open Combat Missions’ where, in a single-player twist on the series’ popular Warzone offshoot, your character is thrust into a large arena where you are given relatively free rein to take on objectives take what you think is appropriate.

Your team, if not physically near you, usually stays within close radio range. They will check in with information about the objectives of each mission, as well as other points of interest to be aware of. However, for all intents and purposes, you are on your own. You alone must sneak through these rooms, trying not to mislead the guards and trying to figure out where to go. Where beyond Call of Duty games have taken their tonal cues from something like HBO’s Band of brothers, Modern Warfare 3 feels much more Rambo or American sniper. Your team is scattered and you alone must shoulder the responsibility that the game constantly reminds you is yours: getting your hands dirty to stop bad guys who would do the same.

The weight of responsibility feels greater, the impropriety of your task more intense, when you are alone, alone with the consequences of your actions. In one mission where you play as Kate Laswell, a CIA agent introduced in the 2019 reboot, you must infiltrate a military base of Kastovia (a made-up Soviet bloc nation) to meet an informant. To gain access to the building where the informant is hiding, Laswell must kill an army major and his accompanying soldier and take his ID card. Laswell justifies it to herself as a worthy sacrifice, and over the radio her ally blames it on the game’s villain, Vladimir Makarov. But there is no one else around to nod grimly at the necessity of her actions, to spread the burden of immorality. Soldiers at war, no matter how gruesome their actions often are, come out very differently from a lone armed woman, no matter how cheerfully she tries to shake off her own guilt.

Even the game’s big narrative moment, the version of the original Modern Warfare 2During the infamous ‘No Russian’ mission you play as if someone is completely alone. You play as an Arab woman named Samara on a flight to see her family. The game’s Russian ultranationalist villains grab her and tie her up in an explosive vest. They smugly admit that she plays the role of a terrorist well enough to pin the blame on an uninvolved Arab nation, then push her into the crowded cabin of panicked passengers who grab her in fear and anger before her vest ignites.

Her isolation from her allies is meant to stoke players’ ire against the game’s villains. But the insensitivity of the anti-Arab racism the game references, its pointlessness within the game, decontextualized from the real world, makes the moment feel unearned. The in-game nation of Urzikstan may have been problematically fictionalized, but there was still something marginally meaningful in seeing freedom fighter Farah Karim lead a group of fierce Arab women in overthrowing their prison guards in the 2019s. Modern warfare campaign. That image is distorted when one of those women is taken, singled out, and made into a lonely, sacrificial pawn to incite a sense of justice and anger against an already cartoonishly evil villain. In the next mission, Karim erases all evidence of the framed hijacking and Samara disappears forever. Her sacrifice serves no greater good and has no meaning other than the demands of a plot.

In previous Call of Duty games you still committed war crimes, but you rarely committed them alone. Most of the time you were surrounded by like-minded soldiers, along with you, in the proverbial shit. The games often highlighted stories of heroic troops, sacrificing their lives for each other and surrendering to greater ideals. These ideals, upon further examination, were often harmful and unjustifiable; 2019 Modern warfarefor example, blames an atrocity committed by America in the first Gulf War Highway of death, about Russia; 2022 Modern Warfare 2 begins with a direct reference to the extrajudicial drone attack of an Iranian major general. Yet it was still possible to understand that these games, underneath everything, were still invested in ideas of brotherhood and loyalty, in glorifying the sacrifices of regular soldiers, while often criticizing the governments that sent them into war sent.

The distinction may seem insignificant, but I spend time on it because if you take away that sense of camaraderie, of being stuck in the trenches together with your siblings, and if instead you make your game about heroics of solitary heroics and stealth mastery, you remove part of the mask that hides the brutality at the root of it all. When my actions take place within a cinematic framework, with dramatic peaks and valleys, silent and loud moments, it is much easier for me to be drawn into the fantasy that the games promise: that feeling of racing against the clock, battling against impossible odds. and resisting the existential threat of terrorist boogeyman.

But when my moment-to-moment experience becomes more about wandering around a wide-open arena, taking silent shots at unsuspecting guards like a soulless, cigar-chomping Solid Snake, it becomes that much harder to swallow the fantasy I’m being fed.

Vladimir Makarov may be back, and we’ll get to see a lot more of his vicious monologues and mocking menace. But if, as a result of the open approach to the game, I already feel like I no longer have a sense of momentum, purpose or connection with my teammates – if my experience is a choice between simple extermination or stealth mastery, in a stripped-down version of the game’s Warzone, itself completely stripped of meaning and geopolitical context – who really cares who the bad guy is, or who the good guys are? Especially when both are often cast as members of abstracted and fictionalized nations in invented locations?

Modern Warfare 3 has finally succeeded in completely detaching the series from history and meaning. It continues the previous games’ practice of adding political texture to explosive ultra-violence, but it’s never been such a hollow shooting gallery, a ghost of a game and a departure from everything that has ever made the franchise appealing to to play.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 will be released on November 10 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. The game’s campaign was reviewed on PS5 using a pre-release download code from Activision. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.