Modern Warfare 3 Devs Worked Nights And Weekends To Ship Sequel

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III’s single-player marketing campaign was panned by critics when it launched early on November 2. Reviewers hit it with low scores and stated it felt brief, rushed, and incomplete. Now Bloomberg stories that the sport was rushed out in half the time of a standard Call of Duty sequel, with devs working nights and weekends to satisfy Activision’s annualized gross sales targets.

According to Bloomberg, the sport was initially pitched to Sledgehammer builders as an growth to Modern Warfare II that may give attention to missions primarily based in Mexico as a substitute of the sequence’ regular globetrotting set-pieces. In the summer season of 2022, nevertheless, Activision executives apparently rebooted the mission as a full-fledged sequel in regards to the Modern Warfare II villain Vladimir Makarov. The firm wanted to fill the hole left by an obvious delay of Treyarch’s subsequent Call of Duty sport, and reportedly determined in opposition to merely taking a 12 months off from the blockbuster’s annual launch schedule.

Read More: Modern Warfare III’s Campaign Mostly Sucks

A spokesperson for Activision denied this, nevertheless. Sledgehammer Games studio head Aaron Halon informed Bloomberg in an interview that the builders who thought Modern Warfare III had initially been deliberate as an growth had been merely confused as a result of it was a “new type of direct sequel,” regardless of the PlayStation 5 model of the sport showing as DLC on the trophies menu and asking some gamers to insert the Modern Warfare II disc.

But greater than a dozen present and former Call of Duty builders informed Bloomberg that Halon’s take “conflicted” with what they had been initially informed. Some of them additionally seemingly labored nights and weekends to attempt to get Modern Warfare III out on time, regardless of the sport solely having half the event time of a standard Call of Duty sequel. “They felt betrayed by the company because they were promised they wouldn’t have to go through another shortened timeline after the release of their previous game, Call of Duty: Vanguard, which was made under a similarly constrained development cycle,” Bloomberg stories.

Call of Duty has made billions for Activision, however the sequence has an extended and increasingly-well-documented monitor document of burning out its builders. One of the large questions dealing with the franchise now that Microsoft owns it (after just lately closing its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard) is whether or not it’ll proceed the seemingly unsustainable growth cycles or let the blockbuster take a 12 months off for the primary time in many years.