Trivia / Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

• Dummied Out: In the released version of the game, the penultimate level has the remains of Task Force 141 and Delta Force join forces, but the Delta player character Frost does not show up for said level. However, there is a sound clip in the game files of Price shouting his last name, indicating that at some point it was planned to have him in the level.
  • One of the DLC Special Ops Missions, Black Ice, has the player addressed as Metal 0-4 (Frost's designation) as they rig what is presumably the same diamond mine seen in Down the Rabbit Hole to self-destruct, potentially resolving Frost's status at the time of that mission. The "canonicity" of the Spec Ops Missions isn't made clear, however, given that another one has you play as one of Makarov's henchmen who kills Pudovkin and Harkov, successfully capturing the President Vorshevsky for Makarov during Turbulence.
• The Other Darrin: Nikolai, MacMillan, Kamarov, and Overlord all have new voice actors for this game.
• Pre-Order Bonus: The Hardened Edition, which came with bonuses such as a free 1-year-subscription to Call of Duty ELITE, a Juggernaut-themed outfit for your Xbox LIVE Avatar, and "Soap's Journal", a document written from Soap's point-of-view, detailing the events of every mission he was involved in across the series. Additionally, preordering the PC version from Steam also gave the buyer a free copy of Call of Duty 4.
• Troubled Production: The long-brewing conflict between Activision and lead elements of Infinity Ward finally came to a head during the development of Modern Warfare 3. A large portion of Infinity Ward's staff ended up leaving or being forced out, forcing Activision to bring in Sledgehammer Games to finish development of the title. Famously, one of the disgruntled employees leaked the complete plot of the single player campaign almost a year before release, which was widely published by the gaming press. And even before this, much of Infinity Ward's senior staff left after 2's completion.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Frost was meant to have a voice actor and not be a Heroic Mime, but the idea fell through.
  • In spring of 2011, a lot of info about Modern Warfare 3 was leaked, including concept art and the game's plot (you can read it here). While most of the plot is similar to what made it into the final product, there are several interesting differences such as a mission set in the Kremlin, a mission as a U.S tank gunner in Germany^note This one is still partially true. During the mission "Goalpost", you (as Frost) take control of the gatling gun on a tank and use it against enemy infantry. You're not playing as a new character, using the main tank cannon, or fighting against enemy artillery; but you are using a tank gun., and Sandman participating in the final mission to kill Makarov. The game also has cut lines for Price yelling out to Frost, the player character of the Delta Force missions, which alongside the fact that they actually made a model for him (used for Delta players in multiplayer and Spec Ops) indicates he was meant to take part in rescuing the Russian President, rather than being absent for no particular reason as he is in the released game.
  • Dataminers found references to what appears to be an unused or extended version of the ending that was cut. A handful of code references and musical stings exist for a 'Mysterious Stranger' appearing during the Dubai finale. It's difficult to guess what the context would have been, but a fairly plausible theory is that this stranger would confront Price after Makarov's death as part of a Sequel Hook.
  • Beyond the weapons that returned from 2 and still use their original model and textures in the singleplayer mode like the USP, several other weapons still have some remnant of themselves left in the game files, including the M240 (enough of it left over that the Wii version was able to include it), Vector (was even seen in some pre-release footage), TAR-21, M9 (again, still exists in a complete enough form that AI teammates use it when they run out of ammo for their primary, and the player can even pick it up from them if they die while using it), and several WWII-era weapons reusing files from World at War.
  • Like in MW2 there are a few cut perks: including a few holdovers of perks that were similarly cut from MW2, including "Blackbox" (would have let the player use killstreak rewards longer) and "Saboteur" (capture control points faster), there are a few new ones like "Siege" (player couldn't move, but accuracy and recoil control would be boosted), using launchers as a perk as in CoD4, an "Anytwo" perk that took up the first slot but allowed you to use any two perks from any slots in the other two, an "Endgame" perk that gave the player four times their normal health but made them drop dead after ten seconds, and perk versions of some attachments, like Extended Mags and Akimbo, which presumably would have applied their affects to any weapons the player picked up off of other players. There are also cut lines for being granted the Overkill perk through the Specialist Strike Package (which grants a player additional perks every two kills in lieu of normal killstreaks), despite that the way Overkill works (letting a player spawn with a second primary weapon in place of a secondary) means being granted it in the middle of a life rather than at spawn completely defeats its purpose.
  • The game also had cut, early versions of some multiplayer maps, such as "Plaza" (reworked into Arkaden) and "Meteora" (later reworked into the DLC map Sanctuary). Spec Ops also had one cut mission that would have let the player(s) play through the defense of the Ferris wheel in Chernobyl from "One Shot, One Kill" in CoD4, echoing the Spec Ops map from MW2 that took the players backwards through "All Ghillied Up".