Black Ops 6 dev explains why MW3 campaign backlash hasn’t affected them

Modern Warfare 3’s campaign was largely panned when it launched in 2023, but a Raven Software dev have assured fans that the backlash hasn’t impacted Black Ops 6‘s single-player offering.

It’s no secret that MW3’s campaign wasn’t exactly well received. Players complained that it was too short and lacked substance, while we described it as “lackluster” in our review.

Following the negative reception, Black Ops 6’s single-player component isn’t being released early like it has in previous years. But although it’s not launching ahead of time, the devs have revealed that they didn’t change anything based on the feedback.

In an interview with IGN, Jon Zuk, Associate Creative Director at Raven Software, who handled much of the work on the campaign, explained that their vision for the story was already in place before the launch of MW3.

“All game development is very fluid and we react to a lot of different things, but in the case of the previous game’s reception, we were already pretty locked in on the story we were telling and the missions we were creating,” he said. “So we didn’t react to how that was received.”

Despite Sledgehammer Games claiming they had years to put together MW3’s campaign, other reports have suggested that they had around just 16 months to make the sequel to MW2. Meanwhile, Treyarch and its partner studios have been working on Black Ops 6 since 2020’s BOCW.

Zuk has reassured the community that the time they’ve been afforded has allowed them to “prototype” and test different ideas, as well as giving them confidence when “throwing some things away” that didn’t work.

“When you have the shorter development cycle, sometimes you’re stuck with things just for the time crunch that maybe you aren’t as happy with as you could be,” he told IGN. “So I do feel like we had good opportunities to keep crafting and recrafting the missions until we were happy with them.”

Black Ops 6 is set in the 1990s, picking up the story of Woods, Adler, and co. in the years after the events of BOCW and BO2. It’s said to be close to the length of a classic CoD campaign and longer than Treyarch’s previous campaign.