Thats not what’s going on here. CoD has for the past few releases run an open beta for 2 to 3 weeks, a month or two ahead of release. Buying this package lets you into that 2-3 week beta a week early, letting you get 3-4 weeks of playtime. You can still get into this beta for completely free, just wait a week and don’t buy the game.
Not trying to defend Activision here, cause I still think CoD is a shadow of its former self and these “betas” are nothing more than a demo, but people seem to have the wrong idea about how Activision runs them.
FWIW the open beta will be open, but people who prepurchase get extra skins and early beta access. Activision has been putting anti-consumer features in CoD since Black Ops 3, to my knowledge. That was the first one where you had to roll loot boxes to unlock all the weapons as opposed to just playing MP matches.
Oh okay! I missed out on Advanced Warfare’s online, going straight from Black Ops II to Black Ops III. I remembered people not liking the boost jumping in Advanced Warfare, but I didn’t realize that’s where all the loot box stuff started. To its credit, I remember playing some splitscreen AW with my brothers, and I believe it had all weapons unlocked offline at least. BO3 didn’t have that, which was a disappointment for me in a rural area without internet.
Yeah they were frustratingly bad systems. I was a huge bo3 fan and it made me really sad that I couldn’t use any of the cool new guns because I had bad luck on the slot machines :(
IMO Advanced warfare was worse because it locked some guns behind the crates, and also locked a ton of “variants” behind crates that were objectively better than the base gun
The term “beta” has been abused for so long that it’s become meaningless in terms of what it actually is supposed to be. It’s just a paid demo and/or early access.
Just look at WoW, they had a “beta” for like 2 or 3 months, and a paid early access package. Adding insult to injury they started patching/nerfing stuff like a day after early access. It’s annoying as fuck that they have many months of “testing” and then fail to fix the blatant issues until it hits live servers and even after the early access period. Everything screams like “should’ve bought the beta and early access, huh?”. Paid stuff like betas and early access are just money grabs, and people fall for it. So next expansion will probably be an even longer early access period, or more bonuses.
As for CoD looking like a collection of brainrot operators, weapons and themes, I think they are just trying to figure out ways to keep CoD relevant without releasing actual identical games every time, even if it just means changing the theme. And people are still buying it, so why would they stop.
I’ve been saying this for years. I remember playing the Planetside 2 beta, it ran for months. It was actually used for bug/stability testing, fixing networking issues, balancing, etc etc etc. It was an incredibly important step in developing a multiplayer game.
These aren’t betas, they’re demos that at most will help them do a limited network stress test. The amount of data they can get from 2 weeks of feedback is nowhere near enough to do any real bug fixes or balance changes.
What’s worse is that now, any game that does have a long alpha or beta period is accused of squatting in early access.
Oh man I remember Planetside 2 launch being so insanely laggy and buggy lol
At some point we threw grenades on a giant pile because they just never went off, or sometimes just disappeared as soon as we threw them. I don’t think the devs ever tested that huge influx of players anywhere in the pre-launch stage. It’s hard to predict some things that will go different from testing to live, but man it seems so obvious with large multiplayer titles.
Even WoW still struggled with this, servers becoming laggy and unresponsive even, it’s been better last 2 expansion launches but it’s still not great. And they had over 15 years of data to go on too.
I also remember it being in a pretty rough state early on, all the more reason 2 weeks of testing is a joke.
Although, one thing CoD has going for it, each game changes so little they really don’t need a beta. They’re almost like sports games in that regard, they may as well be released as updates instead of new titles.
People buy it. People then buy the skins. I play the free to play one sometimes and nearly every single person I kill has a $30+ skin and weapons. It's saddening.
One of the funniest things with cod too now, is that people always used to say it was the same game every year, but it is actually the same game every year now, with progress and weapons carrying over.
Gone are the days of a one time purchase and a solid game. (Well in the AAA space anyway)
I say DS for Switch on accident all the time. Like I just had such a good time with the goddamn DS. And yes, the fucking 3ds is also a ds. That was my youth and I’m too old to change monikers now!
It’s not really beta quality. I hopped on with my brother just to see if I was interested in the game (we both played black ops, the original back on the PS3). It was actually extremely stable and pretty fun. He noticed a UI glitch but … it’s not like there was even a feedback or bug report button.
It’s just early access with the disclaimer there might be something wrong… Which isn’t that different from buying a release day game anymore unfortunately.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone refer to it as “ness”. I think I’d be confused – what does the Loch Ness Monster have to do with gaming? – until they clarified.
Right now it’s open to anyone who pre-ordered or anyone who has game pass. it’s open to everyone for free next week. maybe they should have called it limited instead of open, but it isn’t closed to anyone, anyone can get game pass and play the beta rn so it is technically an open beta.
and why are people playing CoD? because it’s really solid gameplay that recieves weekly updates and events to always keep things fresh. the new movement system in this one is really a game changer and makes the game a lot of fun to play.
I believe they’re referring to the slide and dive mechanics. AFAIK considering this is the first game I’ve played in awhile, you can now sprint, slide, and dive in any direction.
Think like strafe sprinting and diving around a corner as you turn your aim around behind you to shoot at someone you just dove passed.
The gameplay has changed so little over the years but that’s because it’s unfortunately pretty solid.
I played a lot when I was younger but stopped because I didn’t have the money, hard drive space, or internet bandwidth to keep up with the new games and updates.
With that said, I actually jumped into this beta since it was included in Game Pass and it reminded me of CoD of my youth.
Will I every give them anymore more money? Nah.
Will I play it some more via Game Pass? Maybe.
My biggest complaint is the ecosystem is cancer. They have CoD HQ that acts as a launcher but can only handle a couple games and if you select to play one of the games it can’t play, it fully closes and launches the game you want to play.
Can you simply download and launch only the game you want to play? Nope.
This is all to get your eyes on as much of their content as possible to really squeeze out those last few dollars.
The amount of players I saw with the skins that cost them $100 minimum was crazy. These are very likely the same people that buy every game every year and are precisely the target demographic they’re marketing towards.
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