Connection issues aside, I'm finding that I have a problem with this game that I also had with Treyarch's games; namely, that the game is simple, and gets old really fast. There's no variety, neither in the perk selection nor in the arsenal (although the laser weapons are a nice addition). Both this game and Treyarch's have bad weapon variety and balance, making it pretty much pointless to use anything other than ARs and SMGs (and the latter ones suck in this game too), small maps which all focus on running and gunning, and an extremely short selection of perks.
Infinity Ward has always been better at offering variety, even in Ghosts. Or maybe I should say *especially* in Ghosts. One of the things that kept me going back to Ghosts was how much fun it was to try new and different things. That game was packed with customization options that made the game quite enjoyable, you could always go and spice things up in one way or another. It has the most perks in the series yet, with very interesting and fun additions such as Dead Eye, it had the new and very viable marksman rifle category (why the hell wasn't this included in AW?), weapons with integrated attachments (such as the suppressed Honey Badger) effectively freeing up one attachment slot and giving you more freedom. The weapons themselves felt all unique and different, even those within the same weapon category (something that can't be said about Sledhammer's or Treyarch's games), so you were always motivated to play with something else. The snipers featured the best balance that this series has had to date, and by far, eliminating quickscoping while actually making these weapons more viable for actual sniping without being overpowered. LMGs were finely tuned as well, now being completely unusable in AW. To top it all off, they had the three killstreak strike packages, allowing for very different styles of play, a feature that MW3 introduced and that for some reason both Treyarch and Sledgehammer still insist on ignoring.
Treyarch's games and AW feel like they want you to play the game a specific way. It mostly caters to run and gunners. One can't find many other viable styles of play in these games, and this is evidenced by the philosophy behind the design of all the maps, and is only aggravated by the lack of options in perks and weapons (in a year we've gone from the COD with the most perks ever, to the COD with the least perks; I think that says it all). All of IW's games allow for much variety in play style, from rusher to a more conservative style of play. If you don't rush and constantly move around in AW or BO2 you are fucked; if a rusher doesn't kill you, the broken spawns sure as hell will by placing someone pretty much behind you. Ghosts got a lot of complaints for the big size of the maps, but in retrospect I find that this size was precisely something that eased the irredeemable spawns of this franchise.
Oh, and with AW being the first COD to have a 3 year development cycle, why the hell do we have *less* weapons than in previous games? And we still have tons of recycled weapons and reloading animations. Where the hell did that extra year go, exactly? Am I supposed to believe that it took a year to implement exo-movement?
I'm pretty much selling AW in a few days. I just don't have fun with it. Even if the game breaking connection problems are solved and we get dedicated servers (hint: we won't), I find that in a few hours of play I've already experienced everything that there is to experience in this multiplayer. I don't feel compelled to come back to try a new weapon, perk or killstreak, or to learn the maps a bit better. They're so simple and there's so little of everything that I've already gotten tired of it all in a few days. So I suppose it's Battlefield 4 and Ghosts plus a little bit of Destiny for me as far as multiplayer goes until something better comes along. Hopefully Evolve.
