Highlights

  • Modern Warfare 3's campaign is widely considered the worst in franchise history, due in part to Open Combat Missions.
  • The Open Combat Missions in Modern Warfare 3 are lackluster and repetitive, with minimal story content and simplistic level design.
  • Battlefield Bad Company's missions offer more variety and a better story, with set pieces that make the player feel like they are progressing in a meaningful way.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has been getting a lot of flak since its release earlier this month, and it's not hard to see why. The onslaught of remastered Modern Warfare 2 maps is incredibly nostalgic for long-time fans, but those same fans have already experienced those maps hundreds of times before. And while Modern Warfare 3's Zombies mode can be fun with friends, it's a huge departure from the usual round-based formula that doesn't hit nearly as hard. But the real disappointment of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is its campaign, and mode that's now widely considered to be the worst in franchise history.

Call of Duty campaigns have never been long, but Modern Warfare 3 is insultingly short if fans are playing on any difficulty lower than Veteran, and this short length only ends up making the game feel incredibly rushed. But by far the biggest offender of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's campaign is its overabundance of Open Combat Missions. While not a terrible idea on paper, this latest Call of Duty gimmick stumbles at every hurdle, making Battlefield Bad Company - a game from 2008 - look more impressive by comparison.

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's Open Combat Missions Pale in Comparison to Battlefield Bad Company

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's Open Combat Missions Fail to Execute on a Good Idea

On a conceptual level, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's Open Combat Missions sound like a natural next step for the franchise's campaign. Over the last few Modern Warfare entries, larger-scale stealth missions have begun to creep into the campaign, dropping players into a large sandbox and tasking them with completing various objectives in a variety of different ways. Modern Warfare 3's Open Combat Missions take this general premise and try to replicate it multiple times throughout Modern Warfare 3's campaign, giving players one key objective and letting them go about it in any way they want.

However, in practice, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's Open Combat Missions end up feeling just a little lifeless and repetitive. With lackluster objectives, minimal story content or voicelines from the campaign's core cast, and overly simplistic level design, these Open Combat Missions are easily the worst part of Modern Warfare 3's campaign. Their dragged-out length can also really affect Modern Warfare 3's pacing.

Battlefield Bad Company's Open Missions Still Hold Up

Though they aren't quite comparable one-for-one, Battlefield Bad Company's missions do share quite a few similarities with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's Open Combat Missions. The general formula of an average Battlefield Bad Company mission sees players advance through an area gradually with their squad until they reach some kind of arena. From here, players get some kind of objective that essentially requires them to clear the area, and it's mostly down to the player on how they approach that objective.

Players can go in all guns blazing, or try to use stealth to reach a more advantageous ambush spot. If vehicles are available, then players could use those to their advantage as well, and if the team has any explosives available, then Battlefield Bad Company's once-cutting-edge destruction physics could be used to great effect to level the playing field, literally. All of this is improved upon in the 2010 sequel, and unlike Modern Warfare 3's campaign, there's genuinely a lot of variety on offer in terms of how players approach the objective.

What really sets Battlefield Bad Company's campaign apart from Modern Warfare 3 is its story and set pieces. In every mission, the titular Bad Company squad accompanies the player, quipping back and forth the entire time. On top of that, each mission in Battlefield Bad Company actually feels like the player is progressing the story in a meaningful way, with set pieces like a turret or vehicle section at the end of a level really cementing the feeling that major events are happening consistently, which Modern Warfare 3 really suffers from.