How long is the MW3 campaign? Time to beat

Modern Warfare 3‘s campaign reunited players with Task Force 141 to take on legendary villain Makarov but faced criticism for its time to beat.

The campaign arrived before MW3’s full launch, continuing MW2’s story while bringing new Open Combat missions and unlockable rewards. Call of Duty’s single-player is usually a short but entertaining blockbuster, however, this campaign received a ton of criticism for how short it was.

Even God of War’s Christopher Judge poked fun at MW3’s campaign at 2023’s Game Awards, saying, “my speech was actually longer than this year’s Call of Duty campaign,” but just how short was it?

Modern Warfare 3 campaign length & time to beat

Modern Warfare 3’s campaign takes around five hours to complete on Regular difficulty, making it the shortest Call of Duty campaign. The time to beat can vary based on the chosen difficulty level, and you can spend a couple more hours trying to get all the achievements and finding all the secrets to discover.

There are 15 missions to complete, slightly fewer than MW2’s 17 campaign missions, but was a few hours shorter.

According to a Bloomberg report, the developers were forced to rush out the campaign in only 16 months – “half the time of previous iterations.” According to Jason Schreier, Sledgehammer devs thought they were developing an expansion for Modern Warfare 2 until “much later in the process.”

However, Sledgehammer Games studio head Aaron Halon responded: “We have worked hard to deliver on this vision which has been years in the making. Anything said to the contrary is simply not true – this is our game and we cannot wait to play it online with all of you.”

Black Ops 6 brings its brand-new campaign on October 25, a sequel to BOCW and the 1980s flashbacks from BO2. We don’t know how long the campaign will be but Cold War was the second-shortest Call of Duty campaign, only taking around five and a half hours to beat. BO6 is getting a significantly longer development cycle though.