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?
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.
Advanced warfare set the precedent. Black ops 3 made it slightly less of a slot machine, but it was still garbage.
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 capable of online MP.
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