Modern Warfare 3 campaign: the meal you cobble together from leftovers when you’re broke

I find late title cards fascinating. When/how creators choose to drop the name of their game/film says a lot about how they perceive their work, and what they want to immediately call attention to. In that way, the title card for Modern Warfare 3’s campaign is quite effective. It tells you all you need to know about the experience you’re about to have with it.

It drops exactly one minute and 25 seconds into the campaign, just as a squad of soldiers emerge to the surface of the water. It is so hurried, lands with so little fanfare, and arrives after nothing of any significance had taken place. It’s the game telling you it offers very little worth caring about, and it doesn’t even know what to do with what little of it there is.

Activision kept touting Modern Warfare 3’s campaign as a direct sequel to Modern Warfare 2’s, so I think it’s fair to bring up the opening of that game to demonstrate just how deep the gulf is between them. Much of MW2’s story revolved around tracking down and disarming missiles that had fallen into the wrong hands. So the game uses its opening to demonstrate the sheer devastation only one is capable of when it is in the “right” hands. The stakes have been established, and it’s enough to justify rolling that title card.