12 months after Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty fans fear Modern Warfare 3 is just going be glorified DLC

gamesradar.com:

The reveal of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, coming just 12 months after the previous Modern Warfare game, has series fans worried that this is simply going to be a glorified DLC pack.

While Call of Duty games have been released annually since way back in 2005, each subseries typically gets a two- or three-year break between entries in order to allow the developers to build some meaningful improvements over the previous title. There was a three-year gap between Modern Warfare in 2019 and Modern Warfare 2 in 2022, for example. While Modern Warfare 3 is being handled by Sledgehammer this time around - as opposed to Infinity War on the previous two MW games - but that's still a tight turnaround on a direct follow-up to MW2.

Back in early 2022, reports from historically reliable insiders suggested that there would be no annual Call of Duty game in 2023, and follow-up reports later in the year claimed that the franchise's next big release would instead be a Modern Warfare 2 expansion. For its part, Activision repeatedly insisted that 2023 would bring us a "full premium release" for Call of Duty.

Now, fans are starting to suspect that Modern Warfare 3 did indeed begin life as an expansion pack before morphing into a standalone game, and there's no shortage of trepidation in various discussion forums that the new game might not adequately address long-standing complaints about MW2.

As one of the more popular posts in the recently created Modern Warfare 3 subreddit puts it, "This game should not exist and should have stayed DLC like the original plan. We’re just getting ripped off into paying another $70 this year."

"So MW2 year 2 with a seventy dollar charge? Yeah, this is gonna go over great," another Reddit user says. Or, if