How long is CoD MW3 campaign? Hours needed to beat explained

Task Force 141 aren’t hanging around this time.

By Toby Saunders

Published: Friday, 03 November 2023 at 14:21 PM

Now that the game’s story mode is available to play in early access, you might be wondering how long it takes to beat the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 campaign.

With all the quality releases in 2023, it’s been difficult to find the time to fit every game in and it’s no different now we’re close to the end of the year and the new CoD is here.

Fortunately, the first-person shooter genre is not known for its lengthy campaigns, with CoD game story modes typically lasting under 10 hours (depending on your skill level). You should have no trouble fitting this game’s singleplayer in if you’re keen on seeing what happens in the direct sequel to 2022’s MW2.

It’s time to find out precisely what Makarov has up his sleeves and attempt to track him down and stop him as the famous Task Force 141 across 15 missions. Go on, it should only take a few hours.

Keep on reading to find out the answer to ‘how long is CoD MW3 campaign?’ and discover how many hours it should take to complete.

How long is CoD MW3 campaign? Hours needed to beat explained

Depending on how you play the game and your skill level, it should take just 3-5 hours to complete the CoD MW3 campaign. Even for a Call of Duty singleplayer, that’s short.

Notable YouTubers with early access have uploaded full campaign playthroughs and a lot of them have completed the entire story mode in 3-4 hours. Its short length can be perhaps explained by the fact that it seems likely the game started out its life as DLC for MW2.

We’ve only suggested it could take as long as five hours to complete as we’ve seen videos detailing it takes just over four hours to complete the MW3 campaign. It’s a short game by CoD standards, even.

As of writing, there’s not enough data on HowLongToBeat for MW3 (2023), but by using the site which collects user-inputted game completion times, you can see that 2022’s Modern Warfare 2 took players around 8 hours to complete on average. Compare that to the 3-5 hours needed to beat MW3 and the new game comes in about half as long as its predecessor.

Typically, we’d expect a Call of Duty campaign to last around 7 hours. They’ve never been lengthy titles. The longest according to players on HowLongToBeat is Black Ops 3, the campaign of which should take players around 9 hours to finish.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though, as a short campaign isn’t necessarily a bad thing – given the sheer number of games worth playing that have launched in 2023, you’re safe in the knowledge that seeing the MW3 campaign through to its end won’t take much of your time.

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