Where is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3?

Nothing makes less sense than the Call of Duty launcher I tried to navigate last night.

I wanted to play the Modern Warfare 3 campaign, the latest Call of Duty that had been added to Game Pass that morning. Expecting a sizeable file, and being that I'm very smart, I got the download underway around dinner time, so that it'd be ready for an evening session. Or so I thought.

Fast forward to 11 p.m., and I'm freshly showered and in my jimjams. I grabbed my Starfield Xbox controller - an 8/10 game but a 10/10 peripheral - turned on the Xbox and sunk into the sofa. The Call of Duty app was awaiting me on the dashboard but, surprise surprise, it was only partially downloaded. Fortunately, enough progress had been made to be able to launch the game. It's time for murder, I thought. But there would be no killing.

The game loaded - so far so good. A mini-intro to Call of Duty played, providing brief glimpses of characters past and present. Some of them I recognised - Price, the lad with the skull balaclava - but most of them were nondescript angry men and women with guns and facial accessories. After that came a colourful demo featuring what I presume are wrestlers, suplexing soldiers left and right. This was very confusing, but it's certainly more exciting than drab fatigues and Jack Skeleton-looking motherfuckers shooting each other with silenced machine guns.

I eventually pressed skip, and that's when the real confusion began.

Menu within menu. Mode after mode; content upon content. I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to be doing. I have never felt more thick, nor more out of touch with popular gaming culture. Never more incapable of being able to parse a menu. So many options, when all I wanted was "single player" and "multiplayer". 

The help messages were anything but, written in what might as well have been a foreign language. They'd pop up at inopportune moments, and never in the middle of the screen. Always off to the side, and small, like a child soldier performing a flanking manoeuvre, about to snipe me with an RPG.

The app was keen to tell me all about the Battle Pass, and I could not skip this lecture. I'll be honest, I don't really know what a Battle Pass is. It's one of those terms that suddenly became accepted parlance, and we are expected to know what it means. I think I've left it too long to ask and Googling it seems defeatist. I'll assume it's just a way for people with more money than sense to cheat. Pay some coin, gain the upper hand. Bigger bullets; longer knives. Smaller heads to make life difficult for snipers. Invisible knees.

I kept scrolling, now free to move amongst the new menus, yet I still couldn't find the MW3 campaign. I stumbled upon a launcher for older entries, which is a nice idea, but unlikely to be of use to anyone other than players with impossibly large hard drives

It took me 5-10 minutes before I finally located the MW3 campaign, only to discover that it wasn't yet downloaded! I should've known that the single player mode wouldn't be a prioritised part of the overall download, and would be one of the last parts to be completed. Resigned to my fate, I tried to join a multiplayer match, but apparently that still hadn't quite finished downloading either. Dejected, I turned it off and went to bed. Tomorrow, maybe?

Turns out that I'm not the only one who was confused yesterday. On social media this morning, I saw several sites sharing guides for overwhelmed newcomers, explaining how to download and access MW3 and which parts of the massive file are required and which are not. That made me feel a little better.

While I haven't been a Call of Duty regular for some time, I do have some history with the series. I'd played a couple of the WWII-era games on PS2 and PSP, but it was Modern Warfare that hooked me back in 2008. It was head and shoulders above every other FPS I'd ever played. From that point on, I'd buy each new entry at or very close to launch, play through the campaign several times, and then sink a few weeks into multiplayer. I did this all the way up to and including Black Ops II in 2012, which was when I felt the series started to lose some of its lustre. I stuck with it for a few more years, on and off, but just for the single player campaigns, and usually well after launch, once it had been heavily discounted. The Modern Warfare reboot was the last entry I touched, back in 2019.

There's a lot to dislike about the series, from Activision's questionable business practices to the glorification of the military and the churn of annual updates, but there are good reasons why it has outlived its competitors and several console generations. At its best, CoD is outstanding, bursting with genre-defining moments. That's why I was genuinely excited to try MW3 last night. 

Tonight, I'll try again. Wish me luck.