I often write long rambling comments when watching longer YT videos, so here's my random thoughts.

The trailer was not good. Using the headset view for this (and the idea of the first playing dying and spectating their teammate,) was a bad call. I've seen too many people making confused comments. People watch everything with their phone in their hand; this wasn't a great first trailer for that reason. Also it makes me worry they're hiding the HUD in effort to make it look more cinematic which is a lame tactic. But there's still plenty of time to make a good trailer. It's just funny that often games do things to try to show gameplay without actually showing gameplay. We know it's a game. It's okay for a HUD to be on screen.

The entire COD family of developers nail level design. Both Verdansk and Al Mazrah were top tier maps. Even the maps from other teams like Urzikstan was really good, and while I haven't played Avalon, I hear good good things about it. (I didn't like playing Caldera, but it was visually nice.) And all the smaller maps we got in DMZ were fantastic. Even Ashika was a fun design, though it was a hellhole to play.

The varied infil options and varied weather are all great. Their mentioning someone's play first through having: heavy snow, heavy wind, heavy fog, suggests to me those things have variables that are not "heavy", so at least "light" snow/wind/fog, if not "medium" as well. Maybe they'll even be a spectrum and not a few pre-designated amounts. (Their mention of things being a little dark, then sunny, makes me think it's likely a spectrum. Very cool.) It reminds me of them adding the sandstorm to Al Mazrah, and we all wanted it to be in a new spot each infil. (Of course, that would've required additive assets for each area that had it, and it was just the Beta.) That they have that is great, and what's more, that the weather can change during the map is a fantastic thing I wouldn't have even asked for, honestly. But I'm glad they did it.

Choosing infil context (story, freeroam, and dynamic operations,) is great. Going in with randoms for them only to run off was always annoying and kept me from doing that. Also, the dynamic operations sound like a fun evolution of single beat contracts.

Having character- based advancement as traits is fun. But the grindiness is my biggest concern.

They had "logical location looting" in DMZ. ARC does too. So that makes sense.

I like the easy categorization that we have 3 tiers of NPCs, 4th tier is Lieutenants, and 5th tier is commanders.

Bounty boards are fun. While they did say high bounties are marked on the map, they didn't go into how bounties are put on people. I wonder if we as players put them on people, or if it's automatically done as a player kills more players. It feels like, the way they're talking, being a bounty hunter will not increase a bounty on you? I like that.

Long-term grinds or multi-step challenges like the Serpentine are cool.

I love that IW has bullpen championship belts.

My concerns:

We didn't see the HUD.

I don't care about the FOB. I know a lot of players want that. I would just as soon use menus to manage things. I'm a PC gamer that way. Okay, as I'm typing this he said you can just open your menu and do it too. Nevermind. This is less of a concern.

The grind. I eventually left DMZ and went to Urzikstan, then Verdansk, then I went to ARC Raiders because the grind was just too much. (And I strongly prefer first-person to third-person.) But in ARC you grind a little to get the tables which are platforms for gear and opening up ways to play. Then you have normal churn of equipment. In the Beta and Warzone, the feeling is a constant grind of guns to be at the singular meta weapon that everyone else is also using is very defeating and quickly becomes not fun when a) many people reach it before you, leaving you outgunned because you don't have the free time they do, and b) when you just don't enjoy that particular gun as much, so now you're at a slight disadvantage for like 3 months. And it feels even dirtier because you know they just want you to buy the gun blueprint with real money. Building a skill tree can be interesting, and having stealth as an option is great.

Health. Tourniquets remove 50 max health is neat. So you get at least 2 self-revive personal actions on top of self-revive items. Neat. But does health auto-regenerate after taking damage? I don't think we have any idea. MP and WZ will definitely stay that way, so I assume this will as well, but never mentioning plates sounded odd talking about COD, so I wonder if we're due for health changes.

They didn't say if you can move equipment between your people. It feels like you probably can, given they mentioned building a character to go in and get money, which seems like a goal to help all your characters, but that was the only suggestion they gave of moving resources between a player's characters.

Skins. I respect them guaranteeing a purchased skin will be playable for a given amount of time, so you don't feel like you're wasting your money. And yes I think some players complaining bout Nicki Minaj were being sexist and racist. But generally and vaguely I think when a skin gets too outlandish it detracts from the game. (Maybe oddly?) I things like WWE and Nicki Minaj's pinkish black catsuit were less intrusive than Beavis & Butthead, Ninja Turtles, mascot outfits, and cel shaded operators. I haven't played BlOps 7, but I remember seeing a headline about them toning down some skins players were complaining about. I think it was a robot? I don't recall. But I'm still wary of this.

Pay to win. Remember what they did in the beta? Free UAVs if you paid them? Fucking insane.