What to Prioritize in Your First Few Hours of Call of Duty: WWII

If you’ve got one evening for Call of Duty: WWII, expect to finish the brutal opening, get settled into its rhythm, and probably clear two or three campaign missions if you don’t poke around other modes. That’s the right way to start. This is not one of the bloated entries where you need a spreadsheet for loadouts or a weekend to understand the systems. The main story runs about 8 to 10 hours, most missions land in that 30 to 45 minute range, and the first few hours tell you exactly what kind of game this is: direct firefights, squad support, short missions, and occasional quieter hub downtime.

That also means your early choices matter less in the long term than in an RPG, but a few still matter enough to waste time if you get them wrong. The big one is not some hidden build decision. It’s how you decide to approach the whole package. If you bounce between campaign, Headquarters, multiplayer, and Nazi Zombies right away, you’ll burn your first night learning menus and systems instead of seeing the best part of the game. For a first-time player with limited time, the campaign should absolutely be your starting lane.

Pick campaign first or you’ll spend your first night in the wrong part of the game

This is the early choice that’s harder to undo than it looks, because it shapes whether the game feels focused or messy.

Start with the campaign and stay there for your first 2 to 5 hours. Don’t open with multiplayer. Don’t let Headquarters distractions eat your session. Don’t jump into Nazi Zombies unless you specifically bought the game for co-op. The reason is simple: Call of Duty: WWII is at its cleanest and most respectful of your time in the single-player missions. Objectives are readable. Weapons are straightforward. The pacing is brisk. You can finish a chapter and stop without feeling like you quit mid-task.

The campaign also teaches you the grounded combat language this game uses better than any tutorial prompt ever will. You’re pushing between cover, taking medium-range fights, clearing buildings, and leaning on squad support instead of sci-fi gadgets. If you’ve played later Call of Duty games that drown you in movement tech and attachments, this one feels heavier and simpler on purpose. Let it be that.

Multiplayer can wait because it asks for more setup. Divisions, public match pacing, map familiarity, and getting used to a 2017 player population are all things that make sense after you’ve warmed back up to old-school boots-on-the-ground combat. Zombies can also wait because wave-based co-op eats time fast and doesn’t teach the core campaign rhythm you came here for.

If your goal is to decide whether this game is worth finishing, the answer will come from the campaign’s first few chapters, not from an hour of bouncing through side modes.

Set the difficulty for momentum, not pride

For a busy adult’s first run, play on Regular. If you’re rusty with shooters, play Recruit for the opening and bump it up later if it feels too easy. Do not start on Hardened just because you’ve played Call of Duty before.

This game’s campaign isn’t brutally punishing on normal settings, but it does expect you to use cover, read lanes, and move with a bit of patience. That’s especially true early on, when the game is teaching you that this isn’t a gadget-heavy power fantasy. Weapons hit hard, sightlines matter, and getting stubborn in the open will get you dropped. On higher difficulties, those lessons can turn into checkpoint repetition fast, especially in the bigger battle scenes.

The first mission everyone remembers is D-Day at Normandy, and it’s effective because it’s chaotic without being confusing. On Regular, you’ll feel the pressure, work through the beach obstacles, and keep moving. On Hardened, the same section can become a stop-start crawl if you’re not already locked in. That’s not a great use of your first night.

There’s no badge of honor for making the opening less fun. The campaign’s value is in the pace, the set pieces, and the squad story around Daniels, Zussman, Turner, Pierson, and the rest. If higher difficulty slows that down before you’re invested, you’ve picked the wrong setting.

A few setup tweaks that are worth the 5 minutes

• Turn subtitles on. The campaign likes its squad chatter, and in louder set pieces you can miss useful lines.
• Adjust sensitivity before you hit your second mission. The guns feel heavier than newer entries, so a touch lower than your usual setting often works better.
• If you play on PC, prioritize stable performance over pushing visuals. This is a shooter with readable lanes and short missions, not a game improved by frame dips and fiddling.
• Don’t obsess over audio presets, aim response curves, or deep options tuning on night one. Get it comfortable, not perfect.

You can always refine settings later. What matters in the first few hours is keeping the flow intact.

Learn the squad abilities early or you’ll play the game the hard way

This is the actual system you do not want to ignore. Call of Duty: WWII isn’t built around perk trees or loadout tinkering in the campaign. Its practical layer is your squad. Teammates can provide ammo, medkits, grenades, or smoke, and using those support calls changes how cleanly encounters go.

New players often miss this because the game is noisy and cinematic, especially in the opening missions. Don’t make that mistake. Train yourself in the first two or three chapters to ask for what you need before you’re desperate.

Need to push a machine-gun position or cross a nasty lane? Ask for smoke. Running dry in a longer firefight? Pull ammo before you force a panic weapon swap. Health getting rough? Use the medkit system instead of pretending you’re still in a fully auto-heal Call of Duty. This game’s combat works best when you treat your squad like a toolset rather than background flavor.

That matters even more because the game’s firefights are mostly medium-range and cover-based. You’re not solving problems with future tech or wild mobility. You’re winning by reading the lane, advancing at the right moment, and using support abilities at the right time. Once that clicks, the campaign gets smoother and more satisfying.

It also makes the story beats land better. One of the better things about this campaign is that the squad isn’t just decoration. Since the game keeps returning to the human scale of war rather than chasing nonstop spectacle, those support interactions help the team dynamic feel mechanical and narrative at the same time. For a first-time player, that’s worth leaning into.

In your first few hours, chase mission completions, not extras

If you’re the kind of player who usually wanders for collectibles or replays a chapter right away for cleaner performance, resist that urge here.

The smart early priority is simply finishing missions and stacking momentum. Call of Duty: WWII is one of the more compact entries in the series, and that is its biggest strength for adults with limited time. Most chapters are short enough to complete in a sitting, and each one gives you a full slice of action instead of a half-finished objective chain. Use that structure. Let the campaign pull you from Normandy into the later pushes like the Ardennes without stopping to turn every chapter into cleanup duty.

This is worth your time because the story and pacing are built for forward motion. The game starts strong, and its best quality is that it usually knows when to move on. If you interrupt that by replaying early sections for perfectionism, you turn a 10-hour campaign into a longer, thinner one.

You can skip early collectible hunting because it adds very little on a first run. Same with chasing every tiny optional beat in the downtime areas. The hub moments between operations are fine for breathing room and character tone, but they are not where the game earns its keep. The missions are.

If you really want a good stopping pattern, use this:

• One short session: finish one campaign mission and stop.
• One decent evening: finish two missions, maybe three if you’re rolling.
• One weekend start: get through the opening batch until the combat rhythm and squad support feel automatic.

That cadence works because this campaign was clearly built around compact chapters. Don’t fight the structure. Take advantage of it.

What to ignore until the campaign hooks you

A lot of players lose time here because Call of Duty: WWII offers several modes, and not all of them are equally useful on day one.

Ignore Headquarters at first. It was meant to make multiplayer feel more social and alive, but for a first-time solo player it mostly creates menu friction. If you’re eager to shoot something, wandering a hub is dead time.

Ignore deep multiplayer plans. Yes, multiplayer has class-driven structure through Divisions and the usual appeal of quick matches, but that’s not the best use of your first few hours unless competitive play is the only reason you installed the game. You’ll get more immediate value from the campaign’s clear goals and stronger onboarding. Come back to multiplayer after you’ve finished a few story missions and recalibrated to the game’s slower, heavier weapon feel.

Ignore Nazi Zombies unless you have friends waiting. It’s a real mode, and for the right group it’s a good side dish. But if you’re alone on a first night, it’s not efficient. Wave-based co-op tends to create the classic “just one more round” time sink, and you’ll spend more energy learning mode-specific rules than deciding whether the game itself works for you.

The exception is simple. If your main reason for buying Call of Duty: WWII is playing co-op with friends, then yes, jump into Zombies early. Otherwise, save it. The campaign is the clean read on what this package still does well in 2024 or 2025.

The first few missions tell you the truth, including where the pace dips

Here’s the honest read after playing it: the campaign opens better than it sustains, but that doesn’t mean it falls apart. It means you should front-load your expectations correctly.

The early stretch, especially D-Day and the immediate follow-up missions, is where the game makes its strongest case. The action is focused, the stakes are clear, and the squad dynamic is easy to read. You get the sense of a grounded war story instead of a carnival of gadgets. That’s the part you’ll know quickly if you like.

Later, the game mixes in slower downtime and some more scripted bits that can feel less urgent. Not bad, just less sharp. That’s normal here. Sledgehammer clearly wanted a rhythm that alternates battlefield intensity with character beats. Sometimes that works. Sometimes you just want the next firefight.

That tradeoff is why I keep pushing you toward campaign momentum in the first few hours. If you get through the early run cleanly, you’ll have seen the game at its strongest and you’ll be in a good position to decide whether to finish the rest of the roughly 10-hour story. If you spend that same time sampling every extra system, you’ll mostly experience the slower edges and menu clutter instead.

For a busy adult, the good news is that the game respects stopping points. You can finish a mission, save, and walk away feeling like you got something done. That’s the real advantage here, more than any progression hook.

A week from now, the one thing you’ll remember is not a menu, a unlock path, or a side mode. It’ll be the feeling of pushing forward with your squad through those grounded, readable war set pieces, especially that opening stretch where Call of Duty: WWII reminds you how effective a short, direct shooter campaign can still be.