Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - November 8, 2011

IW Logic:

Everyone complained about shotguns being too good in MW2, so let's make them completely useless in MW3! That'll show 'em.

What's that? There's an attachment glitch that actually makes them decent, consistent guns? We can't have that! Nerf them back to their rightful place.

 

Well, finally bested the single-player on a combination of Easy and Regular; took about five hours.

Here's my review (bear in mind that me and multiplayer do not exist):

What to fix:

Longer single-player campaign. Less silliness like Delta Force apparently being the main effort in an amphibious assault. Drop the "Russian Ultranationalist" nonsense (seriously, those guys went out of popularity in RUSSIA over a decade ago and basically recycling characters from terrible Dale Brown novels just hurts the series) and give us some genuinely nihilistic villains who're just out to kill everybody because they can. Also: Anyone else seeing their weapons automatically start firing after reloading? Also, beef up the storyline. Russian tanks aren't going to magically roll from Russia to Paris in less than a day. Explain how stuff like that happens, please.

Bring back the intel cheats (and cheat codes for single-player in general). Allow customization of the game's f/x like the original game did.

What to keep: Attention to detail. I'm in the Army and the level of detail on personal equipment/weapons/vehicles is NICE. I remember cringing at the half-assed job BF2 did with firearms and the MW games have never done that. Clever locations-the Siberian diamond mine was nice, as was the junkyard in Afghanistan in MW2 and the television studio in the original game.

 

Nothing will ever be done to the single player storylines every again. Too few people care relative to the fanbase of the series for them to spend any time on it.

 

We should be thankful Bin Laden hadn't been killed by SEAL Team 6 while they were still writing the story. Otherwise we would've been playing as them in huge battles fighting alongside regular infantry.

 

I'd honestly have preferred that to what we got.

 

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this but there's a sign in the new Piazza map that says 'Carne Equine'. It's in the loading screen so it's not hard to spot. What is interesting is that 'carne equine' is Italian for 'horse meat'. I was sure it meant that when I first saw it but then google confirmed it!

 

The single player campaign for MW3 was so funny. It had literally every predictable thing ever. The idea that the Russians would inexplicably invade NY before doing anything with Europe, Canada, or the American West coast is such a laughable idea that the rest of the game instantly became awful. It makes no sense from a tactical/logistical standpoint and it was just put in for a few stupid missions with yet another uberleet special ops squad. Seriously, as soon as I found out the game was going to start with "OH MY GOD BATTLE OF NEW YORK" I wanted to take the disc out and snap it in half.

I also laughed when they upped the pov character deaths, especially that random guy that dies after one mission. The stealth levels are getting very, very repetitive too. Every one of them goes something like "Follow an NPC, WE NEED TO TAKE THEM OUT AT THE SAME TIME, some implausible evasion, then they get caught and book a hasty exit." The final boss fight was really stupid too, and the whole game just felt like an excuse to slap a bunch of random locations together and then evil Russians.

On a side note, battlefield 3/the novelization WAS able to capitalize on the Bin Laden mission, and the novel has no fewer than 5 references to the killing of Bin Laden, despite the game being 1.) from a Russian's pov primarily and 2.) set 5 years in the future. That came across as really tacky and unbelievable to me.

 

Clan Ops have gone live and they've been a blast! My clan got Gold in the first (top 10%), Bronze in the second (top 50%), and Silver in the third (top 50%)! We're all a bit chuffed with the results, and we should be too!

Now I think it's time I Prestiged! I'll have to think about what to do with my Prestige tokens though.

 

Extra classes. Unless you don't want to lose your high tier weapons and perks. IMO spending tokens on a measly 2 hours of double XP is not even close to proportional to a permanent extra custom class or keeping the MP7 throughout the whole run to 15th Prestige.

 

I don't use all five classes so an extra one isn't one isn't going to change anything for me. It's tempting to get the higher level weapons but I'm just as good with the M4A1.