Call of Duty Black Ops 4 - Thoughts of a BO3 fan

The buzz around BO4 has calmed down now and so with everything a little less up in the air, I'd like to throw my two cents in and offer some opinions and some speculations. 
In my last post I was quite negative, I wasn't happy about the absence of a campaign and the idea that the COD I knew and loved was going to imitate Overwatch and Fortnite and whilst the former isn't the case it is a shame the latter is a reality. I think the battle royale sub-genre has become saturated in such a short time and I don't believe adding a battle royale mode to Black Ops 4 is a worth while investment or is going to add value to the package, three months down the line the majority of players will be in multiplayer and then I imagine in the zombies with the smallest population in Blackout. I would have preferred to see them just go whole hog on the multiplayer, even create another "War" mode or something along those lines.

Back a few weeks ago we had those scary reports that Black Ops 4 was more Overwatch than COD and apparently this wasn't the case at all and the leaker admitted he embellished and filled in some blanks but having seen the reveal I wonder how right he may have been to begin with and that's mainly due to a couple of things. The first and biggest thing being that I believe the "equipment" slot was actually an ability slot unique to each Specialist and that speculation is assumed because the equipment slot is on a cooldown and is not replenished upon each respawn, also each specialist has their own unique equipment that is far superior to the other equipment you can use. 
I mean why would you use a frag grenade when you can use Battery's semtex that explodes into smaller grenades, that sounds much better and why use a concussion when you can use a 9 bang? Obviously those are specialist specific but if it's not a specialist piece of equipment it doesn't appear to me to be half as helpful, a soft punishment for not utilising your specialist to the full extent perhaps.
As for the deal with 150 HP, again total speculation but I wonder if some defender type specialists had extra health over others and rather than change it back to 100 per character they kept it to 150 to keep the time to kills a little bit higher, which appears to have been a goal from the outset.

I'm happy to see specialists back either way, I've not been the biggest fan of divisions and I found the RIG design in infinite warfare was basically the same but fewer avatar options, which isn't game breaking but variety is the spice of life, so yes liking the fact we so far have eight specialists, though if I dare to be nit picky, not the biggest fan of the designs. 
The abilities on offer look good; there's a good balance between support and assault abilities and it looks like we'll definitely be needing deploy able cover and ballistic shields in the absence of the smoke grenade which must be a first in, well forever!
The specialist specific equipment looks great as well, so much so I think it was a waste of time adding in frags and combat axes, although I'm curious how much we'll see of razor wire and ballistic shields. The combat is fast and fluid, the maps are small and tight and I think this is going to make player movements around the map very quick and even in the footage we've seen so far, spawn flipping is very active. Defensible positions are going to flipping so frequently that I'm betting offense is going to be a better option than defense.

That last statement has in reality been true of every Call of Duty we've had for a long time, because in COD, gunplay is king. The perks, the scorestreaks, the specialist and rig weapons they were never going to level the playing field. Great players aren't made by those additions, they just help break up the pace and BO4 looks to be no exception.
Gun handling has been reported to feel like BO3 and that's great, the weapons handled exceptionally well in the previous iteration and I'm glad to see a further refinement in predictive recoil because it is annoying when your gun randomly jerks violently in a recoil pattern it decides on every ten minutes.
The maps I saw look good the themes were fun and provided interesting locales, I'm happy to see water come back because it's an interesting and dynamic element that has the potential to change up tactics in exciting ways. 
The standard Treyarch design philosophy is here, medium sized three lane maps, not too many intertwining routes which is what Infinite Warfare and to a ridiculously greater extent, WW2 suffered from. 

The zombies mode looks interesting but then it always has but it's never been a mode I can get too into, it's quite difficult for newbies to get in to as high tier players rush around lone ranger style, doing all the easter egg stuff on their own but that's beside the point. Three different maps, one of which ditches guns in favour of spears and swords it exciting stuff.
The absence of a campaign is a shame, nothing more, nothing less. Especially so as I think the COD developers were the best when it came to telling blockbuster action stories and no other war game has ever come close to imitating that same level of raw enjoyment. 
Like most people who'll play BO4, I'll spend most of my time in multiplayer enjoying that addictive one more win mentality I develop every time I play something competitive so as long as that feels right, I'll be getting my value from the package.

I'm hoping the changes go well and in practise BO4 plays as good as BO3. It feels like all eyes are on this game at the moment, change is often demanded but rarely well received and when you stir the formula this much there's always going to be some backlash.
I personally hope it goes well and we see a bit more individuality among the developers on their own interpretations of Call of Duty.