Call Of Duty or me is just in such a weird spot right now. I enjoyed BO4, but it wore off a lot quicker than BO1-3. The MW beta has been extremely hit and miss, thanks to a plethora of horrible design decisions: lowest TTK ever, classic MW-style killstreak spam as opposed to poinstreaks, camping to the max increased by shit like Ghosts reverting to the "always on" mode and the new horrible map designs, most new modes simply not being good with the exception of the evolution of S&D, less impactful shooting (realistic or not, the laser tag feel of BO4 combined with the higher TTK made for a more balanced and hard-fought experience), lack of visual identity despite the good graphics (believe it or not there's middle grounds between this game's "everything is sterile" and "straight outta My Little Pony" like some DLC maps in BO2-4), butchered UI (who had an issue with the minimap or the fact the UI actually tells you useful info as opposed to jackshit?), and so on.
I am intrigued by some of the MW changes (the movement feels better in some ways, doors add a little bit of tactical depth, etc.) but it's picking too many outdated elements of the original MW games which were rightfully balanced out throughout the years. At the same time, I have a hard time sticking to BO4 with its horrible progression system and surprisingly stale meta (BO3 had less classes and yet it felt more varied) despite the core gameplay being miles better than what MW is offering. I'm curious to see what happens to Blackout, too, a mode I expected to addict me and that I dropped after a couple dozen matches instead, with every update just pushing me farther from what I wanted in a COD BR (superpowers now? seriously?). For the first time in like a decade, I risk just falling out of the COD cycle for a while. Either I was stuck on the new COD for a while or I kept going back to the old one (eg. back to BO3 about 40 days after IW came out), but now I fear that by the end of the year I'll be done with MW, without seeing much reasons to go back to BO4 either, with the games prior that start to feel a bit too old (BO3 is a blurry mess on X1, hard to go back to that after the 4K of the last 3 games).
We'll see how it goes I guess. Will be getting MW at launch and against all odds, the 4 Black Ops games are my top 4 COD multiplayer experiences, so I will not miss Black Ops 5 or whatever it's gonna be called next year for sure. But the future of the franchise does not seem particularly exciting right now, and knowing that Treyarch is being worn thin having to crunch their ass off to deliver the next game after already struggling with BO4 makes me fear that they'll legit come up with a "bad" game. No mainline COD is ever really bad nowadays tbh, but it can be like Ghosts that is so damn vanilla and uninteresting that one can barely remember what's in that game anymore, and I prestiged in it a couple times. The next Black Ops better not be that, because you can say a lot about the franchise but it's always been the boldest and most innovative sub-franchise as a whole, with 2, 3 and 4 absolutely revolutionizing (for better or worse, your pick) how COD plays.
