CoD MW3: How to Fix Campaign Early Access Not Working

New releases mean new bugs, especially when you’re talking about a huge AA game. One of the worst you can experience is early access content being locked behind a bug, and that’s exactly what’s happening. Here’s how to fix campaign early access not working in CoD MW3.

How to Get Campaign Early Access Working in Modern Warfare 3

If you pre-ordered Modern Warfare 3 to get early access to the single-player campaign, and now, when trying to launch MW3, it says you need to pre-purchase to play, do not buy the game again. The issue preventing you from getting into the game might not be on your end.

The official Call of Duty Updates account on X (formerly Twitter) put out a post detailing that there may be an issue with authentication right now.

In other words, for whatever reason, there’s is an ongoing issue with Call of Duty services that can prevent the game itself from recognizing that you own the game. There’s not much we can do to solve the problem as of right now.

I came across this issue myself, and it defeated all my standard attempts to fix it. Verifying the game files, restarting my PC and Steam, checking my drivers — all the standard solutions failed. Verifying the files even redownloaded 40MB of data, or 60 missing or broken files, but to no avail.

I even let MW3 open the purchase page in the Steam overlay, but, weirdly, Steam recognized I owned the game, but the game itself didn’t. My last recourse was to completely reinstall the DLC via the Manage My DLC screen in the Steam Library page. If you’re in Battle.net, you’d go to the Modify Install menuy accessed via the gear icon next to the Play button.

My ISP is not the fastest, so after a twenty-minute reinstall of the campaign, I loaded up, and everything seemed to be working again. Knowing all of this, my advice right now is that if you’re able to play Modern Warfare 3 campaign early access, don’t leave the game. Alt-tab as you like (though you might experience worse performance afterward), and keep tabs on the Call of Duty Updates account for when this issue gets resolved.

That’s it for how to fix CoD MW3 campaign early access not working. For more help with Modern Warfare 3, whether with bugs or gameplay, check out our guides on how to fix error code 0x00001337, the infinite loading screen bug, and more in our MW3 guides hub.