Modern Warfare 3 campaign can be finished in 3-4 hours, it’s claimed

The single-player campaign for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 can be finished in 3 to 4 hours, according to players who’ve been playing the game in early access.

The campaign was released on Thursday for players who’d pre-ordered the digital edition of the game, giving them access to the single-player portion a week ahead of the full release.

But now, following that release, players have reported that the campaign is clocking in at around 3 to 4 hours in length.

Prominent Call of Duty streamer Marley13 played through the campaign in almost exactly four hours.

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By comparison, according to the website HowLongToBeat, which collates how long it took members of their community to complete games, the campaign in last year’s Modern Warfare 2 took around eight hours to beat.

While some older Call of Duty campaigns clock in at around the 6- to 7-hour mark, Modern Warfare 3’s campaign seems to be one of the shorter campaigns for a mainline COD.

The main obvious exception is Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, which didn’t feature a campaign at all after it was dropped, reportedly due to technical concerns, timing issues and negative tester feedback.

Several other players took to Twitter to highlight the Modern Warfare 3 campaign’s brief length and to criticise the new open-combat missions, which see players play through larger, open maps as opposed to traditional linear Call of Duty environments.

The game’s relative short length could be explained by reports that this year’s Call of Duty game was going to be a continuation of last year’s Modern Warfare 2, rather than an entirely separate release.

A Bloomberg report cited people familiar with the project who claimed that Activision‘s original plan was to release a major expansion for Modern Warfare 2, but that the DLC had morphed into a full game.

It claimed that Activision’s goal for the game was to create something that feels “like a standalone, full-price release and also an extension of Modern Warfare II”.