The first thing I see in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is New York City completely enveloped in a chaotic mix of smoke and ash. In a brief presentation beforehand, Infinity Ward creative strategist Robert Bowling and Sledgehammer Games general manager Glen Schofield (who, along with most of the personnel at Sledgehammer, had worked on titles such as Dead Space for EA’s Visceral Games) both promise that MW3 will feature “scale to an entirely new level.” The two studios are indeed collaborating on the next Modern Warfare, but rather than an expected clean division of labor (a la Medal of Honor where Danger Close developed the single-player while EA DICE worked on the multiplayer), the two studio executives simply describe the process as “having the best first-person shooter team in the world working with one of the best studios to create the best Call of Duty game ever.”
Based on the two missions I see, one called “Black Tuesday” which depicts a wartorn Manhattan and another called “Mind The Gap” which takes place in London, it seems like the basic aim of MW3 is applying that insane over-the-top COD action to pure urban combat. While MW2‘s single-player campaign has Russia invading the United States in its plot, and features COD-style battles in locations such as suburbs in Virginia or a freshly invaded Washington D.C., MW3’s globe-spanning campaign will emphasize crazier setpieces in more iconic locations. Bowling mentions Africa, Russia, and the Himalayas as places where the campaign will take you, but the recent trailer (and the Kotaku leak) also point to France, Germany, and possibly Dubai and Prague, as more locations for MW3’s developers to apply their sense of scale and spectacle toward.
