Everyone tends to forget how fucked-up broken COD2 multiplayer was for months after it came out, and the refusal of IW to even comment on it until the patch came out four months later, because it might have hurt sales to acknowledge that the MP was nearly unplayable. IW are just as much a bunch of moneygrubbing weasels as everyone else. COD3 had better balanced working multiplayer straight out of the box, and a good variety of maps (setting the game solely in France kind of hurt them there, though), but everyone loves to shit all over Treyarch. Other than the setting and the pretty graphics I don't see where COD4 will be vastly different from any other COD game.
That said, I'm not thrilled with this game, either. Hit detection is frustrating (except for the AI, who are all marksmen, even on easy, and will let the friendly AI continue to shoot and kill them while they immediately turn to shoot at you as soon as you pop your head up from cover), unless you're running melee is useless, and the "drop anywhere" aspect is pretty much as demi said. You hit invisible walls which keep you from landing everywhere (even though you can clearly see the battle going on and that's where you'll eventually have to go), and if you do land outside the green zones you better land on a rooftop or high place away from the enemy, because you'll be immediately pummeled to death if you don't. At least they tried something different, so I'll give them credit for that. There is more verticality than any other WWII FPS I've ever played. The problem is that most WWII FPS games are going to end up being corridor shooters no matter what, because the towns pretty much all form a series of corridors in varying sizes. I haven't tried Multiplayer yet (I want to finish SP first), but I loved the Market Garden map on BF1942, so hopefully it's a little bit similar.
I think what's messing this up for me is the squad combat. They get in your way, just like every other WWII FPS with AI friendlies. GET YOUR FUCKING HEAD OUT OF MY LINE OF SIGHT, PRIVATE PYLE. This probably would have been a better "classic" infiltration-style MOH, where you dropped wherever you wanted behind enemy lines and worked alone, choosing your missions in whatever order you wanted, picking up supply drops, disguising yourself as Nazi soldiers and Generals, freeing POWs, etc. The best console MOH is still Frontline, but I'd put this right behind it just because they did try to put a fresh spin on some of it.
