2023's Modern Warfare 3 may feature the worst-received campaign in Call of Duty history. It has a Metascore of 56 on Metacritic and a “mostly negative” user review on Steam. IGN's own review of the single-player campaign for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 gave it a 4/10. We said: “Underbaked, rehashed and cobbled together from multiplayer bits, Modern Warfare 3's single-player campaign is everything a Call of Duty story mode shouldn't be.” Eurogamer added: “Modern's campaign tapes Warfare 3 appears to have been rushed to market, combining poorly thought out open areas, disappointing linear missions and a meaningless story.” In short, it was all a bit of a disaster.

A year later, Call of Duty fans are once again in for another campaign from the first-person shooter giant, this time with the Black Ops 6 campaign developed by Raven Software. IGN just reported that Black Ops 6 will feature the most diverse Call of Duty campaign ever, but has Raven tweaked anything in response to the response to Modern Warfare 3, or perhaps learned any lessons from Modern Warfare 3's campaign?

Not so, said Jon Zuk, deputy creative director at Raven Software, in an interview with IGN.

“The campaign… the whole game development is very fluid and we respond to a lot of different things, but in the case of the previous game's reception, we were already pretty fixated on the story we were telling and the missions we were creating,” said Zuk. “So we didn’t react to how it was received.”

A key difference between the developments of Modern Warfare 3 led by Sledgehammer Games and Black Ops 6 led by Treyarch is time. Modern Warfare 3, originally conceived as an expansion pack for 2022's Modern Warfare 2, reportedly presented developers with significant challenges as they struggled to create a full-fledged sequel in just 16 months. Sledgehammer studio head Aaron Halon has insisted that Modern Warfare 3 was “years in the making”.

However, Black Ops 6 has had a longer development time than any other mainline Call of Duty game. Treyarch has been working on it for four years since Black Ops Cold War came out in 2020. And Raven also benefited from this additional time during the campaign.

“The extra development time certainly gives us time to prototype a little bit more and try a little bit more, figure out if it's fun and if it works, and throw a few things away,” Zuk explained.

“When you have a shorter development cycle, sometimes due to time constraints you get stuck with things that you might not be as happy with as you could be. So I feel like we had a good opportunity to develop and rework the missions until we were happy with them.”

Players can also expect Black Ops 6's campaign to last longer than Cold War's, Zuk confirmed, although your mileage may vary depending on how much time you spend in your safehouse hub.

“You can go back, talk to your team, upgrade your weapon and your equipment and things like that,” Zuk said. “And you can search around the safehouse a little bit, but there are players who will do all of that, and there are players who will do none of that and just say, “I want to get to the next mission.” ASAP.

“So I think the length of the game will vary from player to player, but even if you try to do the speed-run version of it, it will be longer than Cold War.”

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