Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Campaign Dev Raven Didn’t React to Modern Warfare 3 Campaign’s Terrible Reception: ‘We Were Already Pretty Locked In’
2023’s Modern Warfare 3 includes perhaps the most poorly received campaign in Call of Duty history. It has a metascore of 56 on Metacritic and a 'mostly negative' user review rating on Steam. IGN’s own Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 single-player campaign review returned a 4/10. We said: “Underbaked, rehashed, and cobbled together from multiplayer parts, Modern Warfare 3’s single-player campaign is everything a Call of Duty story mode shouldn’t be.” Eurogamer added: “Clearly rushed to market, Modern Warfare 3's campaign tapes together ill-conceived open areas, underwhelming linear missions, and a meaningless story.” In short, it was all a bit of a disaster.
A year later and Call of Duty fans are yet again faced with another campaign from the first-person shooter behemoth, this time the Raven Software-developed Black Ops 6 campaign. IGN has just reported on how Black Ops 6 is set to offer the most varied Call of Duty campaign ever, but did Raven tweak anything in response to the reaction to Modern Warfare 3, or perhaps learn any lessons from Modern Warfare 3’s campaign?
Not so, Jon Zuk, associate creative director at Raven Software, told IGN in an interview.
“The campaign… all game development is very fluid and we react to a lot of different things, but in the case of the previous game’s reception, we were already pretty locked in on the story we were telling and the missions we were creating,” Zuk said. “So we didn't react to how that was received.”
One key point of difference between the developments of Modern Warfare 3, led by Sledgehammer Games, and Black Ops 6, led by Treyarch, is time. Modern Warfare 3, originally conceived as an expansion pack for 2022’s Modern Warfare 2, reportedly imposed crunch on its developers as they battled to create a fully-fledged sequel in just 16 months. Sledgehammer studio head Aaron Halon has insisted Modern Warfare 3 was “years in the making.”
Black Ops 6, however, has enjoyed a longer development time than any other mainline Call of
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