the latest call of duty entry dropped about a month and a half ago and there have been many patches and some new things added. maybe you have been holding off on buying the game or targeting christmas. so how is the game? what has been added and changed?
one big problem that a lot of people on all platforms had was game instability, crashes, errors etc. across all platforms. on this front it seems like things are getting better. however, i play on xbox and amazingly it seems to be the more stable build when compared to pc and ps4. i still get the odd crash to home screen, particularly when a new map loads. the user interface also freaks out from time to time. pc and ps4 complaints seem to be getting less as well but i hear some players on ps4 still frequently get "blue screen" crashes. as for myself on xbox, i can easily play for hours without any major errors or crashes so thats good. performance (on the base xbox at least) is fine. not really the 60fps experience but close enough.
as for connections, servers and hit detection. since i'm in south africa and it doesn't look like we have xbox mp servers, it's a bit difficult to answer. i'm still very restricted with matchmaking where the game only connects me to local players over p2p. that really sucks because i cant find games outside of team deathmatch :( hit detection have been good but inconsistent. sometimes it feels like all my shots land like expected other times it feels like i'm shooting right through someone in front of me. apparently the game servers abroad have been bumped up to 60hz now so thats nice.
i dont have much to say about blackout because i dont care and i'm unable to find a game. i do know however that treyarch enabled a lot of new characters that you can unlock by completing missions (challenges). these missions seem quite ridiculous, difficult and time consuming. glad that i dont have to deal with that crap. you still can't use your own camos or paintjobs on the guns in blackout which is disappointing.
zombies seem solid and they added and improved a lot there. i'm not a big zombeeeeees player but the community seems pretty happy with it.
then we get to mp. first of all they have at least added gun game as a mode but of course due to my matchmaking restriction i cannot find a game on it. still no prop hunt or infected though. treyarch has made a bunch of changes to mp, mostly for the good. smgs are at least a bit more competitive but snipers, rifles and lmgs are still meta. the icr rifle is simply a lazer with infinite range and it's hard to imagine that you would want to use anything else. lmgs are still waaaaay to accurate and not enough mobility penalty. the paladin and koshka sniper rifles are just ridiculous. i guess this is my biggest issue with the mp gameplay. they increased the time to kill a lot from previous call of duties, requiring you to land many more bullets to kill someone. but not with a sniper rifle though. most sniper rifles are still easily one shot killers, even if you are at full health with armor. and they are fast and easy to use. this makes no sense to me. with an ar i have to empty half a clip directly into a players head for him to die but some quickscoping mountain dew drinking, doritos eating, pimple faced little brat can insta wipe me at close range with one bullet with a paladin. it's bullshit and i don't understand how not more people are complaining about this. killstreaks are mostly useless and hard to earn but i actually prefer it that way. the specialists are actually pretty cool. it does suck to die to some cheap mechanic like the dog but hey, it is what it is. it's like being at oprah, everyone gets free kills. fundamentally it still feels like the good old call of duty gameplay and thats good.
the one HUGE thing that they added/enabled is microtransactions. i'm not sure how i feel about these black market systems. let me break it down. first there is blackjack's shop. here you can spend cod points (that you can only buy with real world money) to buy cosmetic items like skins, emotes & stickers. secondly there is the contraband stream. it is a tiered system similar to fortnite's battlepass. as you play the game you unlock tiers for free and each tier typically has a cosmetic item you earn. it would take around an hour of playtime to unlock one tier. the streams are time limited and the current one has 200 tiers so it would take you about 200 hours of playtime to unlock all of them. this is pretty ridiculous. of course you can also spend cod points (real money) to unlock tiers and they are not cheap. thirdly there are special orders. similar to blackjack's shop you can spend cod points (real money) to buy items and gear but this time you actually pay to unlock a contraband stream that requires you to complete a series of challenges in order to unlock the items that you payed for.
so far all of these items on the blackmarket are simply cosmetics so it's not pay to win. that being said, you can spend an absurd amount of money on these cosmetics. most of these items and streams are time limited and there is an insane amount of items available. the current contraband stream secretly goes up to 900 something tiers. so in terms of US dollars, it could cost you over $900 to buy all those tiers, and numerous $5-$20 outfits and weapon skin packs and special orders. if you are a collector trying to get everything, you better be a saudi prince or something with boat loads of cash to throw away. in my opinion, nearly all of these cosmetics are ugly or useless. the outfits are just basic color changes, nobody gives a damn about stickers, calling cards are old news and weapon variants/skins/signatures/mastercrafts are so few and far between and still requires grindy challenges to complete in order to unlock. the emotes are pretty cool but nobody has time to emote in mp and there is no end game podium which all-in-all makes them rather useless. taking all this into account i cant really complain that these items are extremely over priced and the tier progression is slow because the items suck. however, they are ripping people off and there will be kids destroying their parents' credit cards. it is also not much of reward to play the game.
they also added the nuketown remake map to the game for free. personally i've never been a fan of nuketown but another map in the rotation is welcome.
at the moment bo4 is a 6/10 for me. if it had better matchmaking or perhaps a campaign it would probably have been an 8 or higher. it's fun and pretty. frustrating at times but it's the same with every cod game. the big question for me is the future of this game. i hope the life cycle of this game is more than one year. i hope that when they add non-cosmetic items to the game like new weapons, that they aren't locked behind a pay or massive grind wall. i hope they add better and more rewards for casual players. i hope they add more game modes and fix matchmaking so that i can play these new modes. i hope they add more specialists and maps for free because f**k the black ops pass.
