If I’m being perfectly honest, I had no interest in the Black Ops 7 beta and haven’t played any of Black Ops 6 since the few games I got to play during its beta period last fall. It seemed just ok but mostly four little lets had me completely burned out on Call of Duty for the better part of a year now: SBMM. After grinding out the camos and battle passes for Modern Warfares 22 and 23, Skill Based Match Making had me completely burned out. Between the battle passes starting to feel like a full time job and the matchmaking being what it is, I was cooked. Still kind of am ¹. When I saw that the rumors were true that wall running was making a comeback this year I couldn’t even trouble myself to watch COD Next. That shit needs to stay out of Call of Duty. We did this once and it was miserable.

Randomly, I get a text from one of my friends I used to play Call of Duty with asking if I wanted a code from COD Next, that he had a few spares. I figured what the hell. I’ll get a few days out of it and enjoy hanging out with the boys.

I was prepared to write up a whole thing about how it was ok while I was partied up but I was tossed into the unemployment lobbies in less than 30 mins of solo play. I’m still prepared to complain about how in the year of our lord 2025 I have to deal with COD HQ and something like 5 restarts just to get in to the game. I’m still going to complain about wall running and stupid movement because I’m not sure who asked for this other than the ten people nostalgic for the jet pack era of COD.

I generally knew I wasn’t going to like it going in. As I said earlier, we’ve been down the wall running / jet pack road and I’m not sure who decided it was a good idea to revisit that. First off, at least in this instance, it just feels broken. Not in a “sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t” way, but in terms of sometimes the bullets hit and sometimes they don’t. It’s almost as if the movement is too much for the hit detection system to handle. Maybe this is more to do with Omnimovement carried over from Black Ops 6. I wouldn’t know since I only played that for about a day during its beta period and bailed. It’s also possible that that we saw this last time we had this type of movement too, it’s just been ten years and everyone’s forgotten. Second, the wall running and jumping seems to be broken too. It was easy enough to grab a few obvious spots and cross large gaps that were obviously meant for this but any more than that and it was inconsistent. There were a few spots on a couple maps where this was obvious you were supposed to get into and I was able to get there but not consistently. Either way this was my second major reason for not buying this year.

I was also generally prepared for the shit show COD HQ is. How many updates and restarts does one launcher need? On initial load it took 5 restarts before I was able to get into the game. If there’s a playlist update, why on earth do I need to do a restart? This is something that should just be updated on the background before the game launches. I’m also convinced that COD HQ exists for two reasons:

1. Daddy Activision needs their monthly active users to look good for share holders and it looks better if the current game or two plus Warzone are all lumped together.
2. To annoy me.

The maps were mid and so were the guns and perks generally. I did appreciate the sort of specialist bonus where if you combine certain perks you get a type of bonus for doing so. I also liked the idea of Overdrive on the score streaks. It’s a new and interesting take and something worth trying. It’s one more thing to unlock but the lowered cost or extra stat on it seem to make it worth doing. It probably would’ve been fine if it weren’t for those four magical letters we all hate. I was ready to enjoy the free ticket to the beta and call it a wrap until at least next year. At least this year I would have Battlefield 6.

But my main reason for not buying was Skill Based Match Making. And then something magical happened.

Somewhere between their infinite wisdom, low pre-orders, player numbers dropping like a stone, and the reality of them about to have their teeth kicked in by Battlefield 6, Activation decided to finally give us what we’ve been asking for. They gave us an “open” playlist where the Skill part of SBMM is greatly reduced (essentially turned off) to the point that it’s only used for team balancing. Let me tell you, it was just like old COD. A lobby was found almost immediately. Lobbies were mostly persistent, meaning it did not disband. The only real downside was that there were sweats everywhere but this is the beta and only the hardcore COD fans are playing.

They said during the beta that it was a test and I expected the rug to pulled out from under us. That this was a justification for them to keep SBMM in the game. Thinking there was no way this was going to make it in to the full game. But it looks like that’s not what’s happening. From the Call of Duty Blog:

Matchmaking Update

We know the big question on everyone’s minds coming out of the Beta is “how will matchmaking work in Black Ops 7?”

At launch, Open Matchmaking with minimal skill consideration will be the default for Black Ops 7 Multiplayer. Simply put, imagine the matchmaking experience of Open Moshpit from the Beta, but as the standard in Black Ops 7 on day one.

Our team feels strongly about providing players with a more varied experience, and the Beta proved to be a great opportunity to test this approach. We’ll be sharing more details as we get closer to launch!

This is great news but I’m still dubious. We are talking about Activision here and we all know the second their player numbers dip they’ll blame it on matchmaking and we’ll be right back to square one. I want assurances this is the way it will be not just for the first season or so of Black Ops 7, but that is is a permanent change going forward to ALL Call of Duty titles.

To be fair, I did enjoy my time with the Black Ops 7 beta. I would be open to buying the full game now even with the stupid wall running as I know I’ll have friends that will play it. But Activision has lost all trust from me. I don’t trust them to stay with the removal of SBMM throughout Black Ops 7’s lifecycle. My snarky complaints about wall running aside, the game genuinely is fun and made me miss what Call of Duty can be when it’s at its best. Treyarch was never my preferred studio but I did generally enjoy their games for the year that they were the game. I think the best thing to do here is to keep an eye on things. If you have Gamepass, know someone who does, or want to subscribe for a month to see how things pan out I guess that’a not a bad idea².

So, while I enjoyed the Black Ops 7 beta, my plan is to wait out Activision. See how things go with Battlefield 6 (which I’m very much enjoying even though I’m not a Battlefield guy) and see if they’ll reverse course on this matchmaking decision and keeping the goofy skins out of the game. Ideally I’ll wait out the year and see what comes with Modern Warfare 4. If I have friends actually playing the game again then, maybe I could consider picking it up somewhere around Christmas.

Or maybe I can convince at least some of them to come to Battlefield 6 instead.

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About a month ago I came home to what seemed like a monitor that was on its way to failing. I had the classics: horizontal banding, ghosting, and flickering that come with failing panels. In an attempt to verify it was indeed the panel and not something wrong with either my new Mac Studio or macOS in general, I booted into Windows. Alas, the flickering issue persisted. The monitor did indeed seem to be failing. Since the panel in question was my MSI 240Hz gaming panel I immediately began searching for a suitable replacement. Some things I needed to consider going forward was the increase in size. In 2020 I had decided that 27” was going to be too big for the space that I’m in but in 2025 I no longer had that option. So off to 27” it was. For the first time I was also considering OLED, even if it was with a healthy bit of caution. I landed on three monitors. All of them Asus since I had passed on their flagship in 2020 and somewhat regretted it. I hit the Asus web store to see what was available that met my requirements. I came away with:

• The ROG Swift PG27AQDM: A 240Hz OLED
• The ROG Swift PG27AQDP: A recently released 480Hz OLED
• The ROG Swift PG27AQN: A 360Hz IPS LCD. My last potential bastion of IPS LCD as a backup.

I put the three of them to a comparison on Display Specifications.

I felt like I didn’t need to watch a review of the LCD as in this day and age you pretty much know what you’re getting with one. At best I would search around to make sure there aren’t any critical flaws. But I wanted to know more about the OLEDs. So off to the Internet I went.

Hardware Unboxed has a sister channel specifically for monitors. So I started there. I watched Tim’s review of the PG27AQDM. It’s an impressive screen and lots of features to love. OLED really can blow you away with color and inky blacks. While I’m not a photographer, I do expect my photos, and more importantly my games, to look as they should. So I was very disappointed to see that while sRGB colors were good, they weren’t great and would need tweaking. I really dislike the idea of calibrating the monitor as it seems like more work that I honestly shouldn’t have to do. ViewSonic ruined me back in the day by having great color out of the box.

Next up was the PG27AQDP. While it still had issues with sRGB, it was much improved and there were ways to bring it closer in line. 480Hz is nice but as long as it was a fast and variable refresh rate it was fine. COD hits anywhere from 120 to 300 and anything else, like Doom or most single player games, will at least look great in OLED. The only snag is the price: $1000 US.

I checked other reviews but most said the same things as Tim, just in a less technical way. So I checked Amazon and Micro Center for availability. This is a lot to pay for a monitor but there were only three in stock so I decided to reserve one and then stop in over the weekend before the reservation expired and see if I could check it out in store before walking out with one. Long story short: I walked out with one.

Colors, 27”, OLED, 480Hz

First things first, we need to talk about the colors. As expected, the colors are amazing. Inky blacks allow for colors to pop. Games and media look, I’m assuming, as the artist intended. To be fair, there will be detail missed as areas that were once gray on an LCD are now pitch black. The difference is that now it looks like it was always supposed to look: dark.

Take a look at Rogue One:

I was also very concerned about fitting the monitor on my desk. As I said earlier, my arrangement is for 25″ and while 27″ may not seem like that big of a jump, the physical size of the device takes up more room than the previous screen. Sadly I’ll need to adjust everything about an 8th of an inch right. But I also was afraid of 27″ simply being too big to keep track of things while playing games, especially games like COD. I’m constantly multitasking around the screen and felt like that would just be too far a distance for my eyes to travel to check the HUD elements in the corners. Turns out it’s fine but what I was not prepared to do was adjust my mouse movements to compensate for the larger screen.

We all know that 1ms response times on LCDs are the goal and as we go up in refresh rate that also helps input lag come down. OLED has a unique advantage in that all response times are sub 1ms, which feels incredible. Because OLED can redraw motion so fast the clarity of this monitor while playing something fast paced like Doom or COD is amazing.

Now, 480Hz is something I will probably never need or use for quite some time. Unless I start playing games like CS2 or Quake I’d argue I’m never going to use it. Most games I play hit 300 FPS at best. To be fair, while we’ve realistically hit the point of diminishing returns at 240Hz. I wasn’t looking for anything higher than that. There are some e-sports titles like CS2 that will be able to take advantage of this. Nut that’s very few games. I can notice a bit of a difference but it’s nowhere near as stark as going from 60hz to 240Hz. Its nice but I absolutely could live without it. Maybe time will change my mind on that.

OLED Problems

You would think that with all these good things to say this monitor would be a keeper. Generally, you’d be right. The thing about it is there’s some issues with OLED in general that I was not prepared for, even if I was prepared for some of the bigger ones.

• Burn in is an issue with OLED. Period. It’s not if, it’s when. For the prices that Asus is asking for this panel, I feel like a 3 year burn in warranty is enough. Unless you use this only for content consumption and gaming you’ll have burn in sooner rather than later. This concerns me as I use the panel for personal work on my Mac and in Windows. I also use of for remote work for my day job. That’s a lot of hours with static content. Following Tim’s abuse of an OLED over on Monitors Unboxed gives hope since that’s all he’s using an OLED for and is a disaster scenario and his seems to be holding up ok considering. Still, the burn in is an issue in general, even with TVs. I think this was about the only issue I was prepared for going in.

• Variable Refresh Rates are useless since they can’t be used. This is something I was unprepared for. Yes the hardware is capable of doing it and it does indeed do it but using it creates a flicker that almost no reviews talk about. The only review that mentions it was the one over at rtings.com. It’s very distracting even if it doesn’t seem to happen during game play. The only real solution is to turn it off. So then why bother including it? Yes, the monitor has an anti flicker setting but it’s still there. There is no good solution to this other than to turn it off.

The Last Of Us Part 2 Remastered Menu Screen

Doom The Dark Ages Chapter End Screen

Call of Duty Loading Screen

• On the Mac, waking the Mac from sleep and letting the panel come up produces issues so I turned off VRR on the Mac as well. It’s not needed there so it’s no real loss.

• The 480Hz refresh rate also seems to be a problem for the Mac display driver. I have random crashes of macOS that, as best I can tell from the crash report, are due to the display driver crashing/panicking while trying to put the monitor to sleep.

Will I keep it?

For weeks I was torn between keeping it and returning it. Yes, the colors and everything are amazing. The response times when gaming are perfect. Even when there is natural motion blur during fast games, like COD, the screen as clear as it can be. I ended up watching Rogue One and some other TV shows over the weekend just to try it out fully. It’s a gorgeous panel and the 480Hz refresh rate is nice even if it is barely noticeable above 240Hz and a little overkill. The 27″ size doesn’t bother me as much as I was afraid of while gaming, and 1440p is a vast improvement over my previous MSI 1080p panel. It makes me want to update my Dell UltraSharps that are sitting here to 27″ now too. I’m just not sure I can get past the combination of burn in, VRR issues, and that $1000 price tag.

I went back and watched Monitor Unboxed’s review of the PG27AQN. At time of release, it also carried a $1000 price tag, which would be about $1100 with inflation. As I watched Tim’s review I was reminded of all the things we go through for finding that perfect LCD. The overshoot. The inverse ghosting. The overdrive. All the things we have to turn on and tweak to make sure we have a clear, clean picture. Even then, it still might not be quite right. There’s always some backlight bleed or uniformity issue. The only upside is that the sRGB color space is perfect on LCDs at this point.

So even in a perfect scenario, I’d be trading uniformity and backlight bleed for burn in and VRR flicker (which can be corrected, even if it sucks to disable it). It really just comes down to which set of problems do I want to have.

Ultimately I’ve decided to keep it. And there’s a few reasons why:

First, we moved from CRTs to LCDs about twenty years ago and back then you could make the same arguments about LCDs and burn in but also that, at the time, LCD was the inferior screen if we’re talking about refresh rates and ghosting. An 8ms response time was considered good in 2005. In some ways it felt like a step back even if the overall picture was better. Same case here. I don’t mind being a bit on the cutting edge here.

Second, there is a three year warranty on burn in. So I look at it this way: at worst I RMA the monitor within three years. At best I get the supposed 5 years out of it before any burn becomes noticeable and unbearable. It’s more than what I would’ve gotten back in the day on my first LCD as there were no burn in warranties that I remember on LCDs back then.

Lastly, and this could just be a placebo effect, but it feels a little easier on my eyes. Because the black is pure black and LEDs aren’t lighting up it feels like it isn’t straining my eyes like a regular LCD monitor does. Black is black because the pixels are off. There is no back light blasting me even when trying to produce dark colors of black. As someone who sits in front of a computer for living that makes all the difference in how I feel at the end of the day.

That said, the only people that should buy this monitor are people who play games that can hit 480 FPS. I’m sure there are better OLED monitors at 1440p and 27” out there for colors but not for gaming. Even then, who’s really hitting these frame rates consistently?

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