I tried the beta a couple weeks ago. Right off the bat, I got windows firewall popups when launching the client which crashed the client. And it’s slow to launch too. The menus are terrible. It actually launches a 2nd client from the first one, which prompted another Windows firewall popup which crashed it again, so I had to go through launching both clients again before it actually got around to launching the actual game (I don’t think that one actually prompted firewall again).

The gameplay was ok. It was pretty smooth and I saw no obvious bugs or crashes. There were some balance problems, but it is a beta so I wrote those off. At the same time, nothing really stood out to me as new, novel, or innovative. I’m assuming this is what the article means by it feeling like a DLC of the last game. I didn’t play the last one but I can see it not being any different. Maybe just new maps. Those kinds of things used to be released for free in games (and many games still do) in order to keep the game alive and retain players so they keep paying those microtransactions.

The biggest problem I had was that I noticed some guns are unlocked just by playing the game. But some guns specifically said they had to be unlocked in the shop. Literally pay to win weapons. I’ve played CoD games in the past with microtransactions and they always only sold cosmetics so I didn’t mind, but weapons now? That’s a no from me dawg.

Lastly, I prefer playing games with friends. But due to the nature of randomized respawns in most of the game modes, you don’t really experience coordinated gameplay. You could play battle royale but I’m over that now. So I’m back on OW2 instead. While it has stupid expensive skins that used to be free, at least it’s not pay to win, and I can enjoy actual team play.