Dresden said:
It's the worst CoD game ever made. Maps feel disjointed, are small, and are basically rehashes of earlier maps - Fallen is like the aborted remains of Outskirts, etc. The guns all have odd, seemingly random stats and basically have Stopping Power turned on permanently. Graphically the engine is really showing its age.
MW2 might have been a mess balance-wise but at least the fundamental gameplay was good. This is just pure shit.
I agree. The maps are my biggest complaint as well. There's almost no verticality to about half of them, no points for teams to control, and the choice of domination locations in some maps seems as though it was an afterthought in the map design process.
It feels as though IW/Sledgehammer took the MW2 engine, raised the weapon damage by 30% or so (which makes latency differences more decisive in whether you win or lose a face to face gun battle), and didn't choose to play and assess the improvements and problems with Treyarch's Black Ops.
As compared to Black Ops, weapons do more damage (so that for most weapons, it takes one fewer bullet to kill), grenades have a significantly smaller damage radius, and equipment and tactical nades seem less useful in light of the lack of points of control on maps.
I think the changes and map design make for a significantly worse multiplayer than Black Ops. Black Ops seemed like a game designed to correct the problems with MW2 multiplayer, and MW3 reverted the series back to a place that I'm not a fan of. It's more random and "arcadey" than ever. For someone who enjoys multiplayer strategy, I think you'll be better served by games like Black Ops, Gears of War 3, & BF3, depending on taste.
Because latency is always a problem in console peer-to-peer multiplayer, the higher damage that a player can incur in those three games helps weigh one's success in battle more towards skill and strategy rather than latency. In MW3, you die so quickly that in some matches you can be killed before you ever have a chance to respond. It works both ways, but certainly the host of a match almost always dominates in a much more obvious way than any previous CoD multiplayer.
