Since I'm a WoW addict, naturally I'm a Blizzard fan, of sorts. But my mind is blown every time I see anything from Call of Duty on the launcher. I've been really out of the loop, and recently saw this.... and I'm shocked. You have to BUY the game for "open beta access", like how does that make any sense? Also, the general look of the game and its marketing now looks like a $5 ripoff FPS game on Steam... What the heck happened?
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.