With the official announcement that this year’s Call of Duty is Modern Warfare 3 (stylised as Modern Warfare III), Activision has now confirmed details on how content will carry forward from Modern Warfare 2 and into Warzone – a first for the Call of Duty series.
In a blog post outlining the carry forward feature, Activision has details how the vast majority of in-game unlocks from Modern Warfare II will be carried over to the direct sequel, including “weapons and cosmetic content, including Bundles, Operators, and other rewards and unlocks from the game”.
However, there’s two important things to note about this: firstly, there’s exceptions where vehicles like the Tactical Amphibious Vehicle will not feature in MW3 and so unlocked skins for that will not carry forward, and secondly, there is no “carry back” from MW3 to MW2 for new weapons and unlocks. That said, weapon progression is cross-game, so you can keep levelling up weapons in either multiplayer suite.
As with the first Call of Duty Warzone, the free-to-play battle royale game Warzone 2.0 will be upgraded with new content from MW3, but previous weapons and unlocks will remain available.
Let’s dig into some more specifics:
- Operators and Operator Skins unlocked in Modern Warfare 2 will carry forward to Modern Warfare 3, including content that is no longer available to buy or that had limited time availability.
- All weapons and their Blueprints will carry forward, as will attachments and Weapon Camos.
- Some Modern Warfare 2 attachments will work on Modern Warfare 3 weapons, though this is on a case-by-case basis
- All weapons and their Blueprints will also carry over, as will all attachments and all Weapon Camos. Some Modern Warfare 2 attachments will also work on Modern Warfare 3 weapons.
- Weapon Charms, Weapon Stickers, Emblems, Loading Screens, Calling Cards and Vehicle Skins (for vehicles included in Modern Warfare 3) will also carry forward.
You won’t be too significantly disadvantage if you’ve not bought and played MW2 before MW3 – outside of simply not having the same level of progression – as all of the base weapons that are present in both games will be unlockable within MW3 as well by levelling up or completing challenges.
That said, any operators that were unlocked by playing through the MW2 campaign, and any content that was only available for limited times during MW2’s seasonal content will not be available to MW3 players that haven’t unlocked them in the previous game.
All in all, this feels like a good move by Activision, but also plays into the reporting that Modern Warfare 3 was originally planned to be a smaller yearly expansion instead of a separate full game release. In development with Sledgehammer Games taking the lead, this morphed into a full game launch, but clearly still has ties back to that previous expectation that COD would take a “year off” and MW2 would have a two-year life cycle.
Looking back on last year’s game, Nick said in our Modern Warfare 2 review: “There’s some rough edges to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II that keep it from hitting the heights of the 2019 Modern Warfare, though most of its flaws can and will be fixed or improved through patches. Still, there’s an action-packed story to play through, plenty of multiplayer and a light co-op mode, and the promise of more in future. With Warzone 2.0 just around the corner, the future is certainly bright for Modern Warfare 2.”
Source: Call of Duty