Modern Warfare 3 goes back to Verdansk to debut campaign, teases open-ended missions

Activision has appeared at Opening Night Live to debut Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's campaign, but not before teasing the open-ended nature of select missions that accompany the story mode.

The rainy Operation 627 starts with a strike team delicately gliding through the ocean to what appears to be an abandoned castle. Once our team infiltrates the stronghold, they sneak through empty corridors while using night vision until they stumble upon the enemy.

Even when the guns start firing, things remain cinematic as we go underground. It's at this point the lights go out, with only the flash of gunfire to illuminate the interior momentarily. Things don't stay that way for too long, though, as we go back to night vision.

After more gunfire, we eventually make our way to a door with the intention of breaking through, though that's where the gameplay tease leaves us.

Still, there's plenty of nostalgia to enjoy in the gameplay sequence above. The infiltrated structure we see is the same Gulag plenty have visited again and again in the original Warzone map, Verdansk. Speaking of Gulag, that's the name of a mission from the original Modern Warfare 2 that features the rescue of prisoner 627, who turns out to be Captain Price. We don't see Price in the trailer above, but given it's called Operation 627, we might just see him yet.

As for the Open Combat Missions, we only saw a tease of a few, but developer Sledgehammer describes them as side content "positioned seamlessly alongside" the main campaign. Expect to tackle tasks in open areas with various loadouts, vehicles, and killstreaks.

"You can go in quiet, equip suppressed weapons, and complete all the objectives without the enemy ever knowing you're there," creative director David Swenson says. "If you want to go in loud, you can strap on armour plates, hit the enemy head-on, and Open Combat Missions will support it."

Check out our Gamescom Opening Night Live 2023 live coverage at the link.

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I joined GamesRadar+ in May 2022 following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good measure. When I'm not running the news team on the games side, you'll find me putting News Editor duties to one side to play the hottest JRPG of 20 years ago or pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new cloak – the more colourful, the better.