I don't know if you remember but I compared it to Fury which also failed. No world map, just a "town" or lobby type of area to buy your gear and upgrades while you wait for your match to begin.

The PvE is suppose to have gotten better but from my understanding it is still instanced PvE so it kind of defeats the purpose yet again. There are (or will be for final) at least 2 cities that I saw the last time that I played but it looked like the same to me except you had different vendors really in the other parts of the "cities".

Perhaps they are just testing this differently, however as others have said, so far it has been a huge disappointment. I still play when I can though, which seems like never lately because ever time I have time to play, their servers are down or I'll just get home and have to download some huge ass patch that I don't feel like staying up all night for and end up going to bed before it even finishes downloading and play COD:WaW while it does it.