Highfire... will you marry me?
besides that...
Battlefield isn't exactly advancing either. Sure. It looks pretty. But you shoot stuff, drive stuff, etc. All first person shooters nowadays are the same of the previous. And games that try to change the pace and format (Brink is a great example) get hammered by reviews and inevitably 'fail' because of it.
Borderlands? Fallout 3/New Vegas? Bulletstorm? DUKE NUKEM FOREVER???
and what do you mean Battlefield isnt moving forward? B2 was an excellent game that defined class-based online shooters. Bad Co.1 blew us all away with the superb Frostbite engine, and then came back with an updated Frostbite in Bad Co. 2!
Battlefield 3 looks like a friggin' documentary how good it looks! combined with the Frostbite
2.0 engine, who knows what DICE will accomplish?
Not to mention that CoD4 was an excellent step forward in the FPS genre and raised the bar for shooters everywhere, but every game afterwards has been just trolling along the X-axis, never going up the Y-axis. Sure we get different killstreak rewards in some games, but IW and Treyarch have been keeping the industry down with their same-ness. There's no y-axis movement in innovation, gameplay, anything!
Look at Just Cause to Just Cause 2, or, more popular, Assassin's Creed to Assassin's Creed 2. How about last gen's Jak and Daxter to Jak 2. There was nothing wrong with the first one, but Naughty dog came around, improved gameplay, and made an overall better game in the end. Dead Rising to Dead Rising 2? GTA 2 to GTA 3? Resident Evil 3 to Resident Evil 4? Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2?
All the developers for the above games took their some-flawed-more-than-others games and made a better sequel in the end, because they wanted to move along the Y-axis in quality.
Let's look at Raven, who's co-crafting the Singleplayer with an Infinity Ward who lost half its good members thanks to Activision.
Quake 4? no. Wolfenstein 2009? no. Turok? no. A history of sub-par FPS's does not bode well for MW3's newest developer.
Remember how Microsoft took a handful of its guys and made 343 to handle Halo? well, imagine that with Activision, only, instead of being a group of developers making the multiplayer aspect of MW3, it will be a group of publishers who won't innovate because they know the cries of "four legs good, two legs bad" still exit MW fans's (LIKE YOU) mouth, engorging in the same multiplayer experience and falling ever deeper into the Skinner Box's monotony.