By setting the bar for innovation, they mean taking the formula that Medal of Honor: AA used and milking it to death.
The ability to milk this franchise past a few games back, and even if you could get something to come out of that dried and withered teat, it would only be a small rancid burst of putrid gas that has slowly accumulated within the decaying corpse of the COD franchise, which i hear they are calling COD Ghost, which is some-what fitting.
Did you play the campaign of BO2? They changed several things there, strike force missions for example. Missions with large, open areas (for a CoD title at least) and several optional challenges. It's completely different when compared to the campaign of MW2 or MW3. Thing is: The franchise is succesful the way it is. If they change too much people may not "recognize" their game anymore and play something else. From a personal point of view I'd say my favorite title so far was Black Ops. I loved the campaign, multiplayer, everything seemed to be just about right. Comparing this to World at War they changed several things to the better. Not everything but the tendency was good. Then they changed some other things when doing Black Ops 2 and those I didn't like, it actually got worse. Changes and/or refreshes aren't always a good thing. The better (subjective perception) something is the easier it becomes to make it worse, the harder to improve it (dramatically).
Ok, but they said the same thing for COD Blackops2 with all that dx11 fancy shmancy talk and look what we got in the end, meh at best with LOD popup galore.. SP is good but MP maps are a disaster, again especially coloring in night levels. No wonder there are almost none (one map), by Zombies its nothing but black and it looks terrible. :S
Because they release one every year in November. Hell, they've got four different studios working on the IP now. Makes me sad for Raven Software. Wish they could somehow get away from Activision, but since Activision owns them... they'll be stuck in the CoD MP DLC hell for years.
New trailer with in-game footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Zxnx3W-HA18
I thought that trailer looked pretty good, maybe not enough to buy it at launch but other than Far Cry 3 that has applied to every FPS i've saw over the last few years. Visually it did look inconsistent, but probably a mix of footage and it certainly looked better than the previous games.
I used to be a really big fan of this series, but I can't get excited anymore.. I'm actually trying here looking at all the new news and trailers and stuff but it's actually not interesting.. I'm not trying to be a "Jerk".. I'm just reacting to what I am seeing and reading.
I'm hoping they do something with the gameplay and story telling. But, since they seem to be really pushing a new graphics engine as the HUGE step forward... I doubt they'll actually do anything to really improve on the series.