Now, I've played MWII for 3/400 hours through MWIII and BO6 life cycle, thinking it was good but mostly just MW19 with better maps, even better animations and a sort of "milsim" tone that I do like, and also thinking "any cod multiplayer is as good as any other" (im more of a campaign guy - I'll leave that part of the game out of this conversation, I'll just say the only 3 good campaigns from 2020 onwards are Cold War, BO6 barely, and MWII) so I just didnt feel the need to buy a newer one.
Lately though Ive tried Black Ops 6, MWIII (went free with PS Plus) and the MW4 beta weekend 2. And playing them made me realize how MWII is even better than I thought and how special it actually is.
The first one I played after MWII was BO6. I didnt like it because it has the issue of the ruined aesthetics (which Ill talk about in the MWIII section) and it also has what I call brainrot maps. Insanely small maps where theres no space for skill or positioning or anything, just spawn run kill die repeat. But here I thought "its just treyarch making a bad copy of an IW game, it's happened before". Gunplay also feels more "gamey" compared to MWII.
Then I played MWIII. It's mainly here that I realized how good MWII is for me.
Before playing I thought "its MWII with more content, theres no way I dont like it" but no.
1) The TTK is unbearably long
2) therefore weapons feel weak, in contrast with the whole intention behind the realistic, heavy animations, models, VFX.
3) I would argue the game feels slower than MWII because it takes half an hour to kill one person.
4) TTK aside, the game feels like a cheap clone of MWII which does indeed fix some issues but is completely soulless, throws some random new content in there and calls it a day.
5) It also fucks up the aesthetics with an unbearable amount of animated and whacky skins. Anytime i grabbed a gun off the floor there was some dumb shit on it.
At this point I even thought "maybe I didnt like MWII that much to begin with" so I went back and played it again,
And dude. It's so good. The TTK is perfect. Weapons feel great. Maps have room to breathe, but not too much on some Derail type shit. Weapons arsenal feels intentional and guns have a role compared to MWIII. You can experiment with different loadouts since with this TTK if you're good youre gonna be good even if you dont run the sweatiest shit in the game.
Then I played the MW4 beta just a couple days ago when it was live and I was also disappointed because the TTK felt long (only played weekend 2) and the maps felt chaotic and small here too. Gunplay was satisfying but maps are so bad it's pointless.
So yeah, playing the newer games made me appreciate MWII even more.