Let's get this out of the way, yes, I'll (hopefully) be playing more of this game, it is just nigh impossible to recommend this game in its current state. There are several major problems that are plaguing the game, and will continue to plague the game until something major gets changed about them. Let's break a few down:

Minor Problems

-The UI is a severe downgrade from MW2019. A lot of features are outright missing, such as the barracks, or the ability to save your attachment loadouts for each gun, meaning you have to re-do your guns every time you want to change playstyle.

-The UI also has several elements that either do not work at all, or work inconsistently. The most recent back on Nov. 16th fixed some things (camo selection is less touchy now), but there are still a lot of problems. The big one now is that the social tab of the menu ceases to exist sometimes, making partying with friends nigh impossible and requiring a client restart to fix (which only occasionally fixes the problem). Lots of basic visual issues with the UI as well, it does not seem like it was given a particularly careful QA inspection.

-Lots of players experiencing minor graphics and sound glitches, the game seems very poorly optimized.

-IW/Activision has repeatedly advised using older Nvidia drivers because of an issue, but the game will still pop up an error message while loading. Just mentioning this to say that hitting "Continue" does not load up the game, but instead goes to a website; hitting cancel, unintuitively, is what launches the game. This is more to help anyone who gets confused by this.

-Pre-game lobbies are a struggle for a lot of PCs, the game tends to lock up for long periods when trying to load into a new map, which makes adjusting loadouts and such impossible at times.

-Hardcore mode implementation feels like a step down from previous titles. The mode just needs a couple quality of life tweaks that have pretty much been present in any other version of CoD HC mode, but it begs the question of why no one thought to include them here (for instance, I've noticed that care package rewards are not announced, so if you grab one, you have no idea what you got until you go to launch it).

-Weapon strength feels a bit off, especially in Core mode, with guns able to one-shot being inordinately common. That said, in HC mode, the TTK is lower so weapons actually feel a lot more even.

More Major Issues

-The report system is rife with abuse, leading to a large number of people having problems. People are getting names reported as inappropriate for normal unoffensive names and being forced to switch. Others are getting banned from chat having said nothing. A group of people I play with all got shadow banned on the same night after running into the same group of 4 people on the other team repeatedly during one night, suggesting repeated reports affected their ability to play.

-The spawn system has always been rough in CoD games, but feels particularly rough in this one, particularly in Ground War and Invasion. No care seems to be given to the location of enemies in most modes, so you will often appear directly in front of enemies (or see them appear in front of you). It is not uncommon in Ground War and Invasion to spawn directly underneath enemy vehicles and die instantly. This is also true of killstreaks: the spawning system does not check to see if an active streak has been launched where it's putting you, so it's quite common to appear in the middle of an SAE, Mortar, or Precision strike and die before taking a single step.

-Lots of problems with having files that need to be revalidated (that never get fixed when doing so), problems launching the game, loading into matches, crashing, and more being reported by a lot of the community, including by people running PCs that should have no problems running the game in theory. This goes back to the optimization I mentioned above, so it's difficult for any new player to know whether the game will work properly on their rig until after they buy it.

-Lobby connection is very hit or miss; it is incredibly easy to get lobby bugged, where you will be "connecting" eternally, but the game will never start searching for a match. The only easy way to fix this is to completely close and relaunch the game. This happens most often by backing out of a lobby after it tries to load a map (for instance if you need to pick up a friend into your party who just hopped on).

-The matchmaking is atrocious. This isn't even particularly a rant about SBMM (which has its own issues), but the number of times I will sit waiting for a match only to get into a match in progress, thrown onto a team that has 5 kills between them against an enemy with over 30 just between one or two people, and the match is more than half over. I can't really attest to what metric their matchmaking is going, maybe things will even out over time, but thus far, the matchmaking has felt like it seems to swing more for blowouts than close matches; I've had a handful of the latter at best, and dozens of the former.

-The game also, naturally, has no automatic team balancing, so you can end up with a team of 5-6 people against a team of 1 who never gets reinforcements (and there's no real penalty worth caring about for quitting out instantly in that moment since wins and losses don't really mean anything in unranked gameplay, not that there's a barracks to track them anyways).

I'm sure there are quite a few additional problems that I'm not thinking about as I write this, but those are some of the biggest ones. There are some potential fixes to the game, but a lot of them are going to involve tweaking massive systems, and IW/Activision have been close lipped about doing so (no word yet on how they intend to combat report abuse, for instance). Hopefully they can fix things, but for now, I can't say it's a good purchase.

Edit: Side note, The hydro dam level is perfect. I don't care what anyone says, spending the entire match under water humming the Jaws theme and sneaking up on people is extremely fun.

Let's get this out of the way, yes, I'll (hopefully) be playing more of this game, it is just nigh impossible to [i]recommend[/i] this game in its current state. There are several major problems that are plaguing the game, and will continue to plague the game until something major gets changed about them. Let's break a few down: [b]Minor Problems[/b] -The UI is a severe downgrade from MW2019. A lot of features are outright missing, such as the barracks, or the ability to save your attachment loadouts for each gun, meaning you have to re-do your guns every time you want to change playstyle. -The UI also has several elements that either do not work at all, or work inconsistently. The most recent back on Nov. 16th fixed some things (camo selection is less touchy now), but there are still a lot of problems. The big one now is that the social tab of the menu ceases to exist sometimes, making partying with friends nigh impossible and requiring a client restart to fix (which only occasionally fixes the problem). Lots of basic visual issues with the UI as well, it does not seem like it was given a particularly careful QA inspection. -Lots of players experiencing minor graphics and sound glitches, the game seems very poorly optimized. -IW/Activision has repeatedly advised using older Nvidia drivers because of an issue, but the game will still pop up an error message while loading. Just mentioning this to say that hitting "Continue" does not load up the game, but instead goes to a website; hitting cancel, unintuitively, is what launches the game. This is more to help anyone who gets confused by this. -Pre-game lobbies are a struggle for a lot of PCs, the game tends to lock up for long periods when trying to load into a new map, which makes adjusting loadouts and such impossible at times. -Hardcore mode implementation feels like a step down from previous titles. The mode just needs a couple quality of life tweaks that have pretty much been present in any other version of CoD HC mode, but it begs the question of why no one thought to include them here (for instance, I've noticed that care package rewards are not announced, so if you grab one, you have no idea what you got until you go to launch it). -Weapon strength feels a bit off, especially in Core mode, with guns able to one-shot being inordinately common. That said, in HC mode, the TTK is lower so weapons actually feel a lot more even. [b]More Major Issues[/b] -The report system is rife with abuse, leading to a large number of people having problems. People are getting names reported as inappropriate for normal unoffensive names and being forced to switch. Others are getting banned from chat having said nothing. A group of people I play with all got shadow banned on the same night after running into the same group of 4 people on the other team repeatedly during one night, suggesting repeated reports affected their ability to play. -The spawn system has always been rough in CoD games, but feels particularly rough in this one, particularly in Ground War and Invasion. No care seems to be given to the location of enemies in most modes, so you will often appear directly in front of enemies (or see them appear in front of you). It is not uncommon in Ground War and Invasion to spawn directly underneath enemy vehicles and die instantly. This is also true of killstreaks: the spawning system does not check to see if an active streak has been launched where it's putting you, so it's quite common to appear in the middle of an SAE, Mortar, or Precision strike and die before taking a single step. -Lots of problems with having files that need to be revalidated (that never get fixed when doing so), problems launching the game, loading into matches, crashing, and more being reported by a lot of the community, including by people running PCs that should have no problems running the game in theory. This goes back to the optimization I mentioned above, so it's difficult for any new player to know whether the game will work properly on their rig until after they buy it. -Lobby connection is very hit or miss; it is incredibly easy to get lobby bugged, where you will be "connecting" eternally, but the game will never start searching for a match. The only easy way to fix this is to completely close and relaunch the game. This happens most often by backing out of a lobby after it tries to load a map (for instance if you need to pick up a friend into your party who just hopped on). -The matchmaking is atrocious. This isn't even particularly a rant about SBMM (which has its own issues), but the number of times I will sit waiting for a match only to get into a match in progress, thrown onto a team that has 5 kills between them against an enemy with over 30 just between one or two people, and the match is more than half over. I can't really attest to what metric their matchmaking is going, maybe things will even out over time, but thus far, the matchmaking has felt like it seems to swing more for blowouts than close matches; I've had a handful of the latter at best, and dozens of the former. -The game also, naturally, has no automatic team balancing, so you can end up with a team of 5-6 people against a team of 1 who never gets reinforcements (and there's no real penalty worth caring about for quitting out instantly in that moment since wins and losses don't really mean anything in unranked gameplay, not that there's a barracks to track them anyways). I'm sure there are quite a few additional problems that I'm not thinking about as I write this, but those are some of the biggest ones. There are some potential fixes to the game, but a lot of them are going to involve tweaking massive systems, and IW/Activision have been close lipped about doing so (no word yet on how they intend to combat report abuse, for instance). Hopefully they can fix things, but for now, I can't say it's a good purchase. Edit: Side note, The hydro dam level is perfect. I don't care what anyone says, spending the entire match under water humming the Jaws theme and sneaking up on people is extremely fun.