Modern Warfare 3’s campaign has finally unmoored Call of Duty
Call of Duty’s single-player campaigns are known for their follow-along gameplay. You usually play as the member of a unit, a detachment, sometimes even an entire ground invasion. Your squad is often fronted by a competent and lethally effective leader. This leader selects which doors to breach, which bad guys to kill in which order, and which paths to follow as they stealthily guide you through enemy bases, surgically eliminating threats and occasionally getting into larger, more bombastic gunfights. For most of the Modern Warfare games in particular, that exceptional father figure has been the gruff, walrus-bristled Capt. Price, the mythological center of the Modern Warfare pantheon.
Modern Warfare 3 marks a shift, then: a few missions into the game, the camera zooms into his puffy cheeks and beady eyes as you, for one of the first times in the series (that isn’t a flashback), assume control of his corporeal form. No longer are you the young know-nothing who passively follows along; now you get to play as Call of Duty’s emotionally unavailable dad. But this shift is an uncomfortable one, and it reflects broader ways in which this third installment of the rebooted series has begun to take the games off of their familiar rails and into strange, unsettling territory.
Not only does who you play as change inModern Warfare 3, but also how you play it. Far less time is spent in the original linear level structure that pervaded past games. Far more of Modern Warfare 3’scampaign is spent in what its developers call “Open Combat Missions,” which, in a single-player twist on the series’ popular Warzone offshoot, have your character air-dropping into a large arena where you are given relatively free rein to tackle objectives as
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