For 'just' $70, you too can blind yourself in MW3's zombies mode with this garish weapon texture straight out of Garry's Mod

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From Horse Armour to here.

A person holding up two violently glowing Uzis in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023).
(Image credit: Sledgehammer Games / LegoUnlocked on YouTube.)

Modern Warfare 3 has a promotional 'camo' skin, and it's the furthest thing possible from camouflage. Every time I think I'm over microtransactions—every time a new horse armour contender comes along—something hits my dome out of left-field like a high calibre sniper rifle and I'm left wondering: 'how did we get here?'

The weapon, which has been making the rounds on Twitter, is the "free in-game content"  that comes with your purchase of the Call of Duty Task Force 141 Crossbody Sling Bag on the Call of Duty shop (information courtesy of YouTuber LegoUnlocked). The bag is both sold out at the time of writing and costs 60 whole dollars. Around $70 when you include shipping, as LegoUnlocked points out.

The skin is called the "Royalty Tiger Weapon Camo". Because as everybody knows, both tigers and royalty glow like they're made out of nuclear waste. Mercifully, the weapon doesn't look like this in Modern Warfare 3's main multiplayer modes, though its gmod style missing texture chic is arguably just as bad to look at.

No, things don't get radioactive until you go into the game's zombies mode, where the weapon seethes a violent shade of pink-slash-purple. This effect gets worse the more indoors you are. LegoUnlocked demonstrates this by wielding dual uzis and holding them directly to his face like he's trying to burn his own eyes out.

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An image of a garish gun camo for Modern Warfare 3 (2023).
(Image credit: Sledgehammer Games / LegoUnlocked on YouTube)

Players—and stunned onlookers like myself—have taken to Twitter to point at this monstrosity and laugh, cry, or some mixture of both. "70 bucks for an ugly ass tiling emissive map," writes presumably stunned indie dev Jamie D. Meanwhile, another user rightly points out that you could buy Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth for that amount of money, which does seem like a better use of your cash and time.

Being fair, you do get a polyester sling bag out of the deal. You're not paying $70 just to make an entire game mode unusable. But I don't think even the bag's worth it, man. I guess if you like Call of Duty, it's cool, but in terms of game merch I want to buy, "sling bag" doesn't hit the top of the list. Maybe that's why the rare skin's attached to it in the first place. The only upside from this horrorshow is that the memes are already top-tier.

An image of scottish comedian Limmy squinting in bed, used as a meme reaction to a $70 gun skin in Modern Warfare 3

(Image credit: @curveeturvee on Twitter/X.)

A meme reaction to a garish $70 gun on Modern Warfare 3, featuring Ryan Gosling from 2017's Blade Runner staring blankly at a screen.

(Image credit: @diroffus on Twitter/X)

A meme reaction to a $70 Modern Warfare 3 gun skin, featuring two Seinfeld Characters squinting at each other.

(Image credit: @kurtruslfanclub on Twitter/X)

If you did actually want this… thing, you might be out of luck. The skin itself notes it'll only be available "while supplies last." Nevermind the fact you can't run out of codes to give people a vomit texture in a video game. Oh, and there are no refunds, so you can't buy the bag and then refund it to cheat the system. And we all made fun of horse armour. How foolish we were.

Harvey Randall
Harvey Randall
Staff Writer

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.