First of all, I cut my FPS teeth on Ken's Labyrinth running on a 286 and set up a virtual peer-to-peer IPX network over 33.6 modems to run Doom before playing Quake over internet was a thing, so you can fuck right off with telling me I need to "get good" or "don't know FPS."
The reason I switched from arena shooters to COD was there was something about the way COD rewarded positioning over pure reflexes that scratched a certain itch for me. It wasn't bad at Quake or Doom. It was because the fast TTK, realistic maps littered with cover and with plenty ways to move through them, and create-a-class system made it feel fundamentally different from UT and Quake III, which prioritized high-flying acrobatics in open arenas. It wasn't a sim, but it just felt more grounded than Quake III there was something about covering a flag from a high position in Backlot or creeping through the side routes with a suppressed Mini-Uzi in Crossfire to take out snipers that made it feel like nothing else I'd ever played before. The aesthetics were part of that. Your character wasn't a spaceman in neon green. He was a soldier in camouflage, and if you held still in the right spot, you were pretty hard to see, which made being smart about your positioning and movement that much more important.
At some point, Treyarch decided that all this was bad and wrong. They wanted COD to be an arena shooter. They wanted you to jump and twirl off the walls while wearing your hot pink power armor as you whittle away each others' health bars with endless streams of weak bullets. Sure, they took away wall-running, but going "boots on the ground" didn't really change things. Compared to the CODs I liked:
- Run speed and jump height were significantly increased. This fundamentally made the game more acrobatic, which meant that covering an area with an LMG or sniper rifle was far more difficult. I preferred playing where, if the enemy had an area locked down, your only realistic option was to try and flank him, not jump and slide like cartoon monkey.
- Maps tended to have only one or two objects you could take cover behind. For example, on Icebreaker, there was barrel covering a lane that you could reliably get a kill by prefiring at, because there was literally nowhere else at all to take cover. Having so little cover that I can prefire at specific barrels and windows is terrible map design.
- 3-lane autism had gotten really bad. On a map like Overgrown or Pipeline, enemy movement is much less predictable, and there's also lots of cover where enemies could be. It makes the combat feel more like a hunt, and there's much more tension. There are no surprises whatsoever on Frequency or Arsenal. There are three well-defined lanes, only a couple windows where an enemy sniper could be, and virtually no cover. You could almost play it blindfolded.
- Another problem with the increased move speed is that it effectively shortens distances. Enemies are up your asshole 0.5 seconds after spawn on small to medium maps. But since Treyarch prioritized CQ fighting and didn't like to give snipers big fields of view, the large maps, like Casino and Lockdown, were some of the worst maps in the series. I could play Seelow or Overgrown all day.
- They had no way to balance slow TTK with OHK weapons. The MOG-12 + Dragon's Breath was a win button. It felt like turning on God Mode to play with it because of how useless every other weapon was at close range. Since there was virtually no flinch, you could dominate with the Outlaw at ranges where traditionally, a SMG or AR should win.
- The whole game looked like a Crayola-colored Pixar movie.
- Weapon balance was shit for basically the entire game. COD's original weapon scheme and create-a-class was built on favoring first-to-fire in engagements and maps designed around positioning. The scheme doesn't really work for an arena shooter. In an arena shooter, you want the weapon with the lowest TTK. For quite a while, the Maddox was really the only weapon you should run if you wanted to win. They also banned a ton of weapons in competitive mode, which was an admission they could never get the balance to work.
So, not only did they make it an arena shooter, but due to the terrible maps and awful weapon balance, it wasn't even a good arena shooter. I remember when I quit the game. I was playing with the Outlaw on Masquerade and had just single-handedly taken out a group of enemies at one of the floats. And I realized that, despite kicking ass, I wasn't having fun. The map looked fucking gay. My gun looked like a Nerf toy. It didn't look or feel good. I was bored of enemies always being in predictable places. I did not enjoy the weapons; there were no hidden gems that just need some out-of-the-box thinking to be good with them, just shitty weapons and good weapons. That's what cemented in my mind this was a bad game. Getting good at it didn't make it fun. I decided I'd wasted enough of my life hours on a game that, in my estimation, had not provided a single continuous hour of enjoyment the entire time I had played it, uninstalled it, and never looked back.
