>>16445874
Local multiplayer was godlike due to the pick-10 system being the single best implementation of loadouts in a CoD game, and potentially all loadout-based shooters. Killstreaks were also replaced with scorestreaks, which introduced much-needed granularity and (some) balance into the system.
In previous CoD games, you had a certain number of weapon slots, and each gun you equipped in a slot had a certain number of attachment slots available to it. Each of these slots was there by default, and after a few hours you would have all of them unlocked: thus, not equipping your gun with as much stuff as possible was generally a bad idea. Even if you hadn't leveled up a gun much, you would still have access to extended magazines or a red dot sight to replace the iron sights. Players also had much less flexibility: everyone needed to have a main weapon, sub weapon, grenade, and utility gear, plus attachments and personal upgrades.
The pick 10 system was created to encourage players to experiment and build unique loadouts. You had access to potentially everything (once you unlocked it by playing for a few hours), and then you simply picked 10 things, where each thing was something that would fill a slot in the previous games. If you wanted to play traditional CoD (main weapon + 2 attachments, sub weapon + attachment, 3 perks, 2 grenades) then that amounted to 10 things so you could.
If you were a shitter like me who had an unhealthy fixation with riot shields, you could take a riot shield as a weapon, then trade in all the slots freed up by not having a primary weapon, and get additional perks or grenades. If you wanted to eschew a secondary weapon in favour of having tonnes of grenades, you could do that. If you wanted to eschew all your perks in favour of having two fully customized primary weapons, you could do that.
I imagine it wasn't a perfect system online, but it worked wonderfully for the kind of local multiplayer environment I played in.
Scorestreaks were a smaller, but no less important change. Instead of earning killstreaks through kills, you earned them through scoring points. Points were awarded for kills, assists, objective completion, contesting a point, etc. This new system encouraged players to actually contribute to their team instead of camping and ticking enough checkboxes to get a game-ending reward.
As with the pick-10 system, I'm sure it wasn't perfect in online multiplayer since the best way to earn points was killing players, and there was the hunter killer drone (one-hit kill miniature airplane that tracked automatically) sitting at only 300 points, but the idea of the system is much more interesting than anything in the games from CoD4 onward.