Modern Warfare 3 is this year's Call Of Duty, insider says

Heads up, Call of Duty fans - the next mainline game could be coming a lot sooner than any of us expected.

You’ll probably remember that last year, it was reported that in 2023, the Call of Duty series would be skipping an annual mainline release for the first time since 2004. According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, the Treyarch-developed title that was originally planned to come out this year had been pushed back to 2024, and players would instead be able to look forward to an expansion for Modern Warfare II.

Here’s how to find Rust in Modern Warfare II.

Now though, according to a number of industry insiders, this has changed. Yesterday, Tom Henderson reported via Insider Gaming that a “full premium standalone release” is now planned to release this year. He claims that the game will be “heavily connected to the Modern Warfare series”, and could be Modern Warfare III, but this hasn’t been verified yet.

Taking to Twitter, Call of Duty news site Charlie INTEL wrote: “Insider-Gaming’s report corroborates what we’ve heard in that there was a shift from doing just a year-two ‘expansion’ to a ‘full premium’ game for 2023.”

Jason Schreier has corroborated these claims, too, and tweeted: “Early last year, they decided to delay Treyarch's game to 2024 and fill in the blanks with more MW stuff from Sledgehammer. At some point they decided to frame it as a full release.”

Henderson also reported that this year’s game will be developed by Sledgehammer, but stated that it will be “a huge collaborative project across all of Activision’s Call of Duty studios”. Additionally, he claims that there will be two beta weekends prior to release, with the first being between 6 October and 10 October (exclusively on PlayStation), and the second between 12 October and 16 October (across all platforms). After that, players will apparently be able to get early access to the campaign on 2 November, before the game's full release on 10 November.

None of this has been officially confirmed at the time of writing, so do take it with a generous pinch of salt.