There is no excuse for Infinity Ward ignoring a whole decade of improvements and balancing to the formula. Ghost shouldn't work on still players. There should be no closed spawns like in Piccadilly. Spawns should flip when you're trapped. Objectives should be placed in a way to have both teams access them in fair ways. Claymore spam should not have come back. Maps shouldn't have this many blind corners. Killstreaks shouldn't have come back to replace the much better pointstreaks. The streaks shouldn't have been made OP again with few ways to counter them.
There's no excuses. Infinity Ward solved these things too between MW3, Ghosts and Infinite Warfare, so it's not like they were Treyarch quirks or something. COD was hilarious fun back in the days of MW1 and 2 but they were also unbalanced and many things aged poorly as a lot of other shooters and COD episodes solved the inherent issues with their killstreaks and whatnot. In no way it makes sense for a new game to delete EVERYTHING the games did since then to improve the formula. I get wanting to walk away from the advanced movement, the futuristic stuff, the rainbow coloured maps and skins, the run-n-gun subbing a more tactical gameplay. But they went too damn far, that's the issue.
It is irksome. There are poor choices to the extent that I have to wonder what the multiplayer designers were thinking.
Claymores have been an issue in the series - multiple games in the franchise have tried to address their balance, some have omitted them entirely. So you would think, in designing a new Call of Duty, it would be a known trouble area. Yet in the game you can have two of them, you can put them behind doors, you can have them replenish, they explode without a chance to move away. There's E.O.D., then basically no other attempt that I can see to curb their power.
As you highlighted there's pointstreaks. In Modern Warfare 3 it was identified that the killstreak system didn't encourage team behaviour. That has been expanded on in all of the Call of Duty games since. In this game you have to use a perk slot to be rewarded for playing the objective. Why?
It's really bizzare. There's 12 years of these games to look at, within the franchise and outside of it, and there are glaring mistakes that you think would get caught at the concept stage.
