Report: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III was rushed and had too many developers

Yours truly has been the designated reviewer for most of the Call of Duty games the last few years, and those of you who've read my reviews probably noticed that I've grown tired of where the franchise is heading. That's one of the reasons why I didn't want to review Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. I'd also heard some concerning things from people working on the game, so I wasn't surprised when Ben shared his rather negative thoughts about the campaign last Saturday. He wasn't alone either. MWIII's campaign has been panned by basically everyone that isn't an influencer that wants to stay on Activision's good side. How could it go so wrong? Well, it's kind of connected to something I've written about before.

Because Bloomberg's Jason Schreier has published a new report claiming that while Activision might have planned Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III to be a premium game all along, many of the developers were for a long time under the impression it would be DLC for last year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. One of the reasons for this is one of the most obvious things about this game: it was made in half the time of other Call of Duty titles. Not only that. The lead developers at Sledgehammer were originally told to make a smaller-scale Modern Warfare spinoff set in Mexico that would be more achievable to finish in the shorter timeline that was forced on them after Treyarch game got delayed to 2024. These plans changed during the summer of last year, when Activision rebooted that story and instead told the team to make a full-length sequel to MWII. Quite taxing and frustrating for a studio that also experienced some truly horrible crunch while developing Call of Duty: Vanguard.

Some of you might say that doesn't matter when pretty much every Activision studio helps make each Call of Duty game these days. That actually made things even worse. Many of the developers Schreier spoke with said they had to get get approval from Infinity Ward before making changes and putting stuff into the game, which made the process ineffective and frustrating, as waiting on feedback and sometimes being forced to make unwanted changes obviously wasn't fun nor fast.

Needless to say, Sledgehammer's studio head, Aaron Halon, has a different take on the development of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III in his official statement:

"We're incredibly proud of Modern Warfare III - both the full game experience at launch and the upcoming year of content we have planned for the community. On behalf of the extremely talented team across Sledgehammer Games and our partner studios with whom we've collaborated on development, this has been a labor of love to lead the first ever back-to-back sequel in Call of Duty. We cannot wait to see our community's reaction to all that the entire game has to offer, across Campaign, Multiplayer and Zombies.

From the start of development, we have all been laser focused on creating the next groundbreaking Call of Duty game. Long before we wrapped up our previous game, we heard loud and clear from fans about the desire to stay and play together for longer within the same series. And that's what we've delivered - the first true sequel in franchise history. It is also why we added features like Carry Forward for the first time to honor the investment our players have made in the Modern Warfare series.

We're proud to be the team to lead the way on Modern Warfare III. We have worked hard to deliver on this vision which has been years in the making. Anything said to the contrary is simply not true - this is our game and we cannot wait to play it online with all of you."

Notice that the only thing he kind of denies is that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III was originally planned as DLC? The rest of the statement is basically him highlighting the fact that you can take most of the stuff from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II with you into MWIII when it officially launches today and that the developers put their hearts, sweat and tears into making the game. I've never questioned that last part, as the main problem here is what the executives force the teams to do and how fast they have to make it. Let's hope this changes now that they're owned by Microsoft.

Do you care about what happens behind the scenes of Call of Duty games? Do you think future titles will become better when made under the Xbox Game Studios label?