#mw3 2011

[shnezok]

WE NEED MORE COD ART !!!!!1!!!!!1111!!!1!!!!1!!1111!!1

I tried drawing Yuri once but fucked him up beyond recognition and never had the balls to post it.

Funnily enough, that inspired me to start drawing more realistic characters and move away from the anime style—so thank you for your sacrifice, Volkov.

[raptorb0nes]

Makarov + Yuri Sims 4 CC!

Definitely not my usual kind of post, but I recently shared some screenshots from my game on twitter and people have been asking for the CC that I use.

I tried to put together a little file of the customization CC that I used to make these two characters, so hopefully this will suffice haha

Downloads

The files are all located here in this folder. (You only need to download one of the zip files. There's one for either character, or the merged folder of all the resources.) You will need to unzip the files first! There is a readme file in the folder with every link to the cc within the folders. As mentioned in the readme, this is only skin/face details and hair, not clothes, because I mostly just use base game and expansion pack clothing.

Enjoy!

[greeneyedsigma]

Allow me to keep the descriptions rolling with Sandman (MW3 2011) ...Don’t ask me why I got so detailed with him, I love Sandman.

Captain (he got promoted) Robert (Robbie) “Sandman” Miller, pretty much no one even knows his name besides his squad and family. Everyone just calls him Sandman or Master Sergeant. And nobody calls him Robert...except his mother, and only when she’s pissed.

44 years old

he’s got dark blond hair and warm brown eyes.

6’4, in great shape for a man his age, a beefcake with a smidge of softness around his belly, he’s a DILF without actually being a dad. (He has dad energy, like Price)

Has been offered promotion beyond master sergeant multiple times, has never accepted. In Delta Force being an officer means a shitload more time behind a desk than Sandman cares for. Edit: Begrudgingly accepted promotion to Captain.

Born in Long Island, New York. Is the oldest of 5, has three brothers and a baby sister (18 year difference between him and his sister). His dad died shortly after his sister was born and his mother never remarried, so he was like a dad to his youngest siblings.

He was recently “traumatized”, attended his sister's labour in place of her baby daddy and 1) saw her lady bits and 2) saw his niece crowning. (fem!) Frost makes fun of him for being so squeamish about it.

He and Frost are together romantically (because fuck IRL fraternization rules). She calls him Robbie in bed, so the handful of times she slips up and calls him Robbie in public makes him flustered (she thinks it’s adorable and sometimes does it on purpose). Grinch (being the cranky bitch he is) gives them shit about it. Truck gives him shit about giving them shit.

He and Price have been friends for years, since at least the early 2000s, and they both jokingly keep track of who’s saved who’s life and use that tally to cash in favours with the other.

[bellsofficialbalaclava]

yeah price you DO deserve a cigar after all that. jesus christ

[owlixx]

CoD Notes: MW3 Beat

I had heard that the 2011 MW3 was coincidentally also unusually short like 2023 MW3. I didn’t track my playtime, but I did beat it in just a couple sittings, so I’ll have to pull the mission list back up as I go along here to try and recall the exact order of events.

The opening picking right up where MW2 left off actually confused me as a kid because I barely remembered what had been going on. These games were just a couple years apart but 11 to 14 years old is a pretty big jump for a young boy to make since I was a little late to the party on MW3.

This whole game starts with and features a whole lot of Price fretting over Soap, which is doubly funny with a guy named “Yuri” being the most heavily involved with that.

Anyways, I think of the New York mission as the first real mission of this game and it highlights one of my main criticisms of this game: how disconnected the US part of the campaign feels. This story feels like it jumps back and forth wildly between a personal quest for revenge on Makarov and then getting to see WW3 itself as a slightly more ordinary troop on the ground.Now, the New York opening mission itself is fine and serves as a pretty fun introduction to the game with the epic scale and rooftop battling, but it starts to wear thin later on. Also what’s up with that funky grenade launcher they give us for one mission with no ammo refills? Feels like it was meant to exist solely to be in trailers.

The submarine assault mission is fun but then the subsequent boat section is a little too similar to the ending of MW2, especially the way the NPC moves around the boat just like Price.

The first Yuri mission is…fine. Driving the little robot tank is classic gimmick-y CoD but fun enough.

I enjoyed the plane hijacking mission pretty well. I think that’s one of the better reasons to force the player to suddenly be a new character: to both rapidly kill them off and also to serve as exposition for what the bad guy is doing and how high the stakes are.

The African village assault is fine, reminded me of playing RE5 especially in the way of thinking “is this problematic?” the whole time.

The SAS London warehouse assault and subsequent train derailment is a pretty fine mission. I’d be more okay with hopping to this one-off character if we didn’t have so many tangential American missions.

And then of course, the Act 1 closer is the skippable “offensive/disturbing” gas attack victim mission. I think it’s meant to really highlight the destruction on a more personal scale but it just comes across not only cheesy, but a poor imitation of No Russian, which genuinely unsettled me a bit as an adult. This just made me laugh. I also had misremembered this mission as taking place in Paris, whoops, but that’s not until later.

Then there’s the post-gas German mission…can’t remember much here.

Then another, different African country mission for Yuri which only realized was a different place because the wiki told me just now. I enjoyed the sandstorm part.

Then some more pretty bland stuff for Frost in Europe for a couple missions…

Then fighting with the “resistance” which is fun but felt like it could’ve been fleshed out a bit more on the exact circumstances.

And then the big finale of Act 2 where Soap dies and Yuri’s past is revealed! So funny that he dies in both MW3’s, I suppose people are mad about it in the new one because it’s too obvious? I don’t have this massive love for Soap like some fans, I mostly just think the concept of making a silent protagonist into an NPC later is kind of a fun gimmick like in Borderlands, but I’d be much more sad to see Price go and honestly I think it hurt more to see Yuri get killed because I was actually conscious of his character while playing as him. Specifically, I really like the twist that he was with Makarov all along.

Which brings us to the castle infiltration mission. This mission isn’t bad, but the best part is Price antagonizing Yuri the whole time. I really like the complexity of their dynamic here. It reminded me of Bulletstorm, how your cyborg buddy and the soldier woman you recruit verbally abuse you the whole game.

Failed daughter rescue mission, can’t remember a thing about it. Actually I think that’s the one where you get a building dropped on you which is a little fun.

Then the big Russian president rescue mission which is pretty grandiose. However, most of what I remember is Sandman sacrificing himself and Price being like “noooooo!!!!!” Which is hilarious because they barely know each other and all the US characters in this game are soooo boring. I wonder if that’s because the real US military funded this and forced them to write the US soldiers with a very specific cookie cutter propaganda personality.

And the the big finale, where you finally get to play as Price, and in Juggernaut armor no less. A fun finale, if a bit short for all the buildup to it. I like Price as the sole survivor here, I think it fits his character.

So yeah, in the end, I can barely remember anything from the US soldier side of things. It’s deeply funny to me that Yuri gets a face, a character model, a voice actor, a backstory, a playable flashback montage, and Frost gets precisely zero of those things despite playing as him half the game. It feels like IW wanted to have their cake and eat it too, experiment with “what if protagonist interesting?” without committing all the way. I mean, I realize that silent protagonists were kind of the standard there for a bit, especially with technological restrictions at the time, but it seems so silly now in the era of third-person cinematic games like Last of Us and God of War becoming the norm rather than the exception.

Also this game isn’t super visually distinct in the US side of things. Yuri gets all kinds of locales from African village to night time castle to the overcast grey village they airlift Soap out of at the beginning. Yuri gets varying shades of brown and grey as he trudges from country to country meaninglessly since they all look the same. Oh yeah, it is very funny with the Eiffel Tower falls.

Like MW1, I enjoyed use of the G36C with red dot sight most. Although I hit up the ACR from MW2 when I could find it. Which reminds me…this game feels very similar to MW2. I know they’re all very similar to one another, but I think especially going from MW2 on 360 to MW3 on PC means I can’t tell what’s different because it’s a different game versus just a different platform.

Oh, also I did do precisely one survival mode run after the campaign, on Terminal since I had never done that before and had been itching to try it there. Made it to wave 19 in one try, which I am pretty happy with. It’s kind of a clunky mode, if I’m being honest, but I appreciate that it has its own rank and XP, setting the precedent for stuff like BO2’s zombie ranks, BO3’s 3 separate mode rankings, and BO4 and onward having integrated ranks across modes.

Also I could’ve sworn that I only ever played one map in survival but I checked my highs scores and I seem to have records for almost every map. I think the reason I thought that is because half the maps in this game have the same drab, grey palette.

I played one match of multiplayer using Plutonium, the fan mod that adds a server browsers and some other features. The prospect of starting back at level 1 isn’t super enticing, especially when there was basically just one active match. I do appreciate that this game added gun levels, which feels sorely lacking in MW2/BO1. I don’t love camo just being one of the things unlocked via gun level. I do like gun perks decently. I think Black Ops 2 is finally the first game to start handling attachments better.

Overall, I think MW3 had the weakest campaign of the trilogy. MW2 had the spectacle while MW1 had the cohesion, but this game borrows a lot of the same spectacle from MW3. Slow mo breaches were a lot cooler the first dozen times, for example. Driving a boat was cooler the first time.

[justyaraya]

COD OC: Karina Cherepanova

Name: Karina Cherepanova

Nikename: Black Widow

Date of birth: February 12, 1987

Age: 29 (at the time of the events of 2016-17)

Place of birth: Moscow, USSR🇷🇺

Citizenship: 🇷🇺

Rank: none

Specialty: mercenary, Makarov's right-hand man, leader of the Black Widow Squad

Unit: Ultranationalists

Family/Relationships

Mother: unknown❌

Father: unknown❌

Love interest: Vladimir Makarov❤🇷🇺 [Professional relationship]

Reference/appearance

Parameters

Hair: blonde

Eyes: brown

Pigmentation on the body: -

Scars: on the face and hands

Height: 165 cm

Weight: 58 kg

Body type: normal

Equipment

Body armor: lightweight

AK-47 assault rifle

Pistols: M9 and Makarov Pistol (PM)

Cold steel: Tactical knife

Personality

On the surface, it will seem that Karina is calm and harmless, but in fact she is short-tempered and cruel, especially in her methods of unleashing the language of hostages during interrogation. At first, she waits patiently, but the vase of her angelic patience immediately cracks and uses force. She loves to be sarcastic, especially Makarova, and even makes fun of him, she likes his ardor.

Fears - It's hard to say

Biography

Life in the 90s was quite difficult for many people, especially when banditry, theft, robbery, and murder flourished. Karina, one might say, lived in a real hell, in an immoral family, where noisy drunkenness periodically took place, there were fights. Karina does not have a father, her mother found a life partner when the girl was still little. But the one his mother chose was not the one he pretended to be, Instead of a "kind daddy", he showed a cruel man, and his upbringing was beatings, and Karina had a hard time, like her mother, but she believed that she was within the norm, but it affected Karina's emotional state. Due to the turmoil in the family and the lack of money for food, Karina had to work part-time to earn at least some penny, from which she slipped in her studies, graduated from school with grief in half, but then she had to work part-time, and everything in her life turned upside down. One day, unable to bear the anger of her stepfather and the next beatings, Karina took a knife in order to scare, protecting herself and her mother. She was scared at the time, which led to a state of passion, and inflicted a fatal blow on the man, which led to imprisonment for a certain period. The mother did not somehow defend Karina, having been surprised that her daughter was a murderer. Until 2016, Karina became a mercenary.

The meeting with Makarov is rather vague story. Karina decided to try to join his people as a volunteer, even if it was risky, at that moment Makarov needed people. Karina has been training for a long time, on an equal footing with others, and she also trained dogs, making them fighting dogs. Karina also has a four-legged companion, Doberman Fang, the same fighting dog, as well as a guard who always accompanies his mistress. The girl also provided assistance to the ultranationalists by supplying weapons, medicines, equipment, etc. Makarov, although he trembled with her arrogance and barbs, but appreciated her effectiveness in her work, allocated her a small detachment in which she became the leader, and the "Black Widow Squad", a shorter name "Spiders", appeared. They stayed in different parts of the world, Karina had to hide and work in the shadows, because loyalists followed her, which did not always make it possible to deliver a kind of "goods" to Makarov on time. As for her relationship with Vladimir, they are more professional than amorous. She continued to act unflinchingly, as if ignoring all the cold stares and sarcastic remarks, which only increased his irritation. In those rare moments when they were on the same wavelength, a spark of mutual understanding almost ignited the steppe of tension in which they were both immersed. As time passed, and as if in a dance of fate, they began to dance on the edge of a professional relationship, where each step could easily end in collapse or unexpected harmony.

[Biography may be edited]

[cashmerecrow]

141 Poster Boy

[licorishh]

I keep seeing things about how in the new Modern Warfare III Soap apparently has terrible writing and all I can think is that if you had played the original trilogy from 2007-2011 then you would know the original and frankly better Soap had phenomenal writing

[python333]

have you heard about mw3..? if so, thoughts?

i have. i have also heard theories and I Am Upset. so i will be ignoring any character deaths that are so-called "canon" and will instead continue being blissfully ignorant of all of it!!!

and yes i did see a trailer for it, yes i did squeal like a stereotypical fangirl, yes i did immediately start daydreaming for a good hour about ghost being my dad instead of writing when i literally have a fic i still need to do research for :3

[pablochimp]

[bayeis]

I drew Price as a Dr. Suess character and my manager said I needed a new hobby and that the "autistic hyperfixation" is crazy

I'm not even autistic 😔

[gh0stlightblog]

[majikklown]

I feel like people should know this. (This is from the 2007-2011 games, aka the OG games)

As much as I do enjoy the reboot, I really hate how much of a mockery they made of Soap in MW3. This is no hate to the actors they did really good. But the story, it just makes a fool of Soap and everything he does, they take away all his accomplishments in MW3 reboot!

[operative079]

DISCLAIMER: All are personal opinions and may be inaccuracies. I was re-watching the MW3 reboot campaign play-through today and was bugged to no end. So I'm ranting. THIS IS NOT TO SHIT ON ANYONE THAT LIKES THE NEW MAKAROV. I’m a Vladimir Makarov IP apologist in any universe. It’s all on the screenwriters.

SPOILER WARNING

MAKAROV’S CHARACTER & REBOOT MW3

The campaign was confirmed to be originally a MW2 DLC, and it feels like it… It’s like they have a checklist of events: bombing the airport, 141 capture Makarov, Soap’s death… and they’re just putting these events in random durations with repetitive playthroughs in between the events. Shoved together and spackled with fanservice and gut-punches with no emotional scaffolding. It’s pacing by brute force. Ticked the tragedy box, tossed the explosion, and went next.

The Two Makarovs

MAKAROV IN THE OLD TRILOGY (Mainly on MW2&3; 2009-2011)

OG Makarov was so impressionable and well-perceived that it partly contributed to the lack of screen them he had. Every time he appears, he succeeds. He rarely appears but appears when you’re distracted in attempts to stop his aftermath, and terminates the player instead. That’s what makes him terrifying; he seemed unstoppable until his demise. It’s intentionality that was put into designing each mission, and his speech that enforced charm in his character. His conviction ticks out atrocities like mere chores.

When he monologues, “All it takes is the will of a single man,” at the beginning of MW3(2011), we believe it.

OG Makarov was terrifying because he didn’t just kill—you never saw it until the world burned. He didn’t monologue to flex. He meant every word. When he narrates, it wasn’t bravado. It was proven truth by that point. The restraint in his appearance made him feel larger than life. We felt his presence in the absence of his body.

MW 2 & 3 was a psychological cat and mouse chase, not just a military one, where we’re always a few steps behind Vladimir Makarov—you weren't facing Makarov head-on; you were trailing behind him, constantly cleaning up the blood while he was already onto the next thing, honing the mysteriousness of his whereabouts and making us wary of what worse he’s capable of.

In the old Modern Warfare franchise, Makarov appeared for a total of approximately 23 minutes across the trilogy.

Suppose his scarce appearance is a double-edged sword, as you can argue the writing lacks character depth; we knew very little about Makarov’s childhood and other backgrounds until he started his military career.

However, you never had to understand him emotionally to be captivated. He wasn’t sympathetic—he was conviction made flesh. The kind of man who “kills” Yuri without blinking because “loyalty” means nothing without absolute submission and stands firmly with his cause (at least in presentation, that he didn’t act remorseful. However you can argue that he didn’t want to kill Yuri and want fate to decide his death by letting him bleed instead.). That cold clarity was his depth. The way his philosophy eclipses sentiment. He believed in the chaos he sowed. Not for attention, not for ego, but because it was necessary in his eyes.

MAKAROV IN MW3 (2023)

I low-key enjoy how Activision approached the reboot version of Makarov. His obsession with time and emphasis on following strict planning is a new take. Even though the OG and reboot share the same IP, they’re two different characters. I don’t mind Makarov killing his subordinate (Ivan) to prove a point and assert dominance by acts of bombing (to be fair, if we’re generalising both OG and Reboot’s actions can overlap to certain degrees).

Reboot Makarov wasn’t bad—it’s that he was built on gold and then left on a scaffolding. You see the core of something magnetic in him: the obsession with time, the ritualistic nature of his act, the crispness of his tone. That’s potent stuff (And thanks to Julian Kostov’s lovely acting). The writers had something. They just didn’t follow through.

They gave him the camera, but not the weight. It’s like watching a blade being waved around without ever drawing blood that means something. I defend his ruthlessness because he’s a terrorist leader, not a misunderstood poet. He should be brutal. That’s what makes his philosophy so chilling. But there’s a difference between writing a cold-blooded tactician and just using him as a dramatic prop.

Like—imagine taking a man obsessed with timing, and then throwing him into a campaign that has no rhythm. It’s ironic in the worst way.

Depth doesn’t mean redemption. It means rationale. Conviction. Internal logic.

In the MW3 reboot, Vladimir Makarov appeared for 23 to 26 minutes, which is nearly half an hour in a campaign lasting between three and a half hours.

More screen time DEMANDS depth; the longer the exposure, the easier it is to spot flaws. This is where details compensate for the presentation. You can’t spotlight a character and not build the scaffolding underneath. When you take a previously mythic figure like Makarov and put him under the lens of modern characterisation—where audiences expect layers, contractions, psychology—you have to compensate for the loss of mystiques with intentional intricacy.

But instead of nuance, we got… vague charisma and half-baked menace. They wanted us to swoon and fear him, but didn’t give us reasons to do either.

CHARISMA VS. CHARM

Charisma: something raw, innate, gravitational. OG Makarov had it in spades.

Charm: an outward performance, a weaponised allure. Reboot Makarov leans more into this—he’s more emotive, and he smiles slightly. But charm needs context to matter. Without a strong spine of motive and clever writing to reinforce it, it becomes style over substance.

The OG and Reboot encapsulate both to some degree, but it’s clear how Activision wanted to write the Reboot Makarov as this charming, dangerous warlord; they gave him more screen time, but I feel like we’ve barely seen his potential before the MW3 reboot campaign.

Collaterally, Soap’s death felt empty. It's the ultimate indictment of their pacing. If one of the core emotional pillars of Task Force 141 falls and barely lands, something’s broken. It didn’t hit because the stakes weren’t earned, and Makarov wasn’t set up as the monster behind the curtain—he was just another player on the board.

[8-rae-rae-8]

wouldst thou be opposed to... *looks to my right, looks to my left. leans in and whispers* an au within an au?... by this i mean a rewrite.. of sorts.. of running, running, captured, safe, BUT! hurt with NO (or at most minimal) comfort for graves... *i am finger-tenting. my evil mustache curls up. i smirk cruelly*. i want my dear to suffer more, but i have not the understanding of the story (i have never played any call of duty game... i am just in the fandom for the muscular men written with emotions)... i beg of you, be merciful !!

Hey what the fuck does this mean 😭😭

I appreciate the enthusiasm but PLEASE don't rewrite my stuff at all if that's what you're asking. And I'm not rewriting it either at all.

Never, never rewrite my stuff

If you want a good AU to write in the same vein, check out the classification AU and forced reg AU tags on my profile

But do NOT rewrite my stuff, ever. Don't negotiate that, that's a hard line. I didn't think I had to say that

Here's one of the hurt/no comfort fics with Graves though

It's too cold

If you want to get into the CoD Lore:

CoD 4, modern warfare (2007)

CoD MW2 (2009)

CoD MW3 (2011)

The Ghost comics (online free)

CoD MW (2019)

CoD MWII

CoD MWIII

Look for the campaigns without commentary

[sneakmeawristband]

I played COD: MW 1-3 (2019-2023) and THEN I played COD: MW 1-3 (2007-2011) and THEN I played COD: MW and MW2 again but not MW3 because that campaign was hot garbage and I'm disappointed in myself for ever letting it taint my hard drive and I'm currently slapping that start new campaign button AGAIN on MW 2019. So that's how my mental health is doing so far in 2025. What about you guys?