Why i think call of duty is shit.

[Bridge]

If we ignore Cod2 and 4's progress as I was referring from after 4 that's not a whole lot changed other than World at War, hell, they added the same technology twice and we don't even know if Black Ops 2 will keep those features, games have promised before technologies that never made it into the actual game. (fable)
A couple of lighting tweaks and texture streaming (added twice, wut) isn't what I'd call major changes, and in terms of what you can actually see, yes, it effectively is, hell, it was proven by Palistov screenshots earlier, the scenery (buildings forest both barely changing in terms of texture, quality etc).

Infact, quite a few of the features that are anywhere near major were added recently when other engines have had them for years.

Back in 2004 when Valve said they were going to utilize HDR technology in Half-Life 2 it was big news and they even created a new mod just to show it off. Not the first to do it but I am fairly certain it was a first for a 3D game.

CoD may be late to the party when it comes to some of these advanced lighting features but that doesn't mean it isn't complicated to implement them and they did it on an engine that didn't support them natively.

P.S. The reason why they introduced texture streaming twice is because if you look closely Black Ops actually uses the World at War IW 3.0 engine, now IW 4.0. As I said, I'm not a fan of Infinity Ward at all, but I recognize that the new CoD games are well made.

First off, ignoring the engine talk.. well made? I seriously hope you don't mean in the design sense as I could pick out a hundred flaws in the game.

Anyway, didn't notice that, and complicated or not, being late to the party by about five years or whatever is still inexcusable.

We can't ignore the engine talk because that's all I'm talking about. I only briefly played CoD 4 at an internet cafe and MW2 at a friend's house for an hour or so and I found it to be satisfying enough. Not something I'd choose to play because I'm into more strategical shooters but everything worked and looked like it was supposed to. I disagree with the design on a fundamental level though, and it most certainly is unbalanced. But a lot of work went into the engine and you need to accept that. I don't know where people get off undermining other people's work. I'm also not a fan of CGI overuse but I've done 3D modeling before and it's a lot of hard work and you need to put in a lot of time for relatively small results. The things some of these animators do is simply amazing on a technical level and I appreciate that. It's not like they "just did it in a computer", because drawing these things by hand would have been a hundred times quicker. I just disagree with CGI on an artistic level when it is used for no real reason.