All Call of Duty games have 36 month development cycles. They used to have 24 month development cycles, which is honestly kind of crazy considering the sheer quality of some of those games despite such a tight schedule, but they switched to 36 when Sledgehammer were bought onboard. This system tends to work fairly well, but in Black Ops 4's case, something went wrong behind the scenes and it sounds like a lot of work was scrapped and reworked and the final product had to be pushed out the door rain or shine. I believe Blackout was an emergency move where the game was falling apart, was clearly going to be light on content because the campaign had gone up in smoke, so they told Raven to make it in a fairly short span of time. BO4 is a very rushed game. But they were given 3 years, just like the other teams.
As for Battlefield V, that one's interesting. It's not clear when the game began development. It's possible it was in development by another team before BF1 was released. If it began development after BF1, that would explain certain problems with it.
On this subject, though, it has always frustrated me how games that release annually are often looked down upon as "lazy" and there's this common belief that, for example, Call of Duty game are made in a single year. A lot of people seem to assume a 7-9 hour long campaign can just be whipped up in 6 months. (What you actually get when Activision gives devs 6 months to make an FPS campaign is 007: Legends.) Despite having a full 3 year development cycle and being full to the brim with 100% fresh content, a lot of people are convinced that AC: Odyssey is a "reskin" that was whipped up in 12 months. And that's just sad, and a sadly common belief.
