What Is Call of Duty: Elite?
Call of Duty: Elite was developed from the ground up by Activision's Beachhead studio to offer cutting edge features to Call of Duty multiplayer beyond just the game itself. It will launch with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 on November 8th, 2011. Most of the features will be free, and online multiplayer won't cost anything, but there will also be a paid premium service available as well.
"The average Call of Duty player spends 58 minutes per day playing multiplayer. That is more than the average Facebook user spends per day on Facebook. And yet, right now, there are very few tools to unite and super charge that social community," said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing. "Whether it's allowing you to connect with your friends, or people of a similar skill level, people who live in your city, people who share your favorite passions, join competitive clans or social groups, or upload, view and comment on the incredible mass of player-generated content, or watch and comment on exclusive created content, Call of Duty Elite will give people more ways to connect with fellow players than ever before. Elite will also allow players of every level to improve their game with an intuitive suite of tools, and compete in tournaments for both real and virtual prizes."
No Really, What IS It?
Online multiplayer will remain free to play. Elite is, thankfully, something else.
Connect -Activision is still being kind of vague, frankly. Elite is designed to be a sort of all-inclusive community portal for Call of Duty multiplayer. It will be a stat tracking service (similar to what we get with Bungie.net for the Halo games, we assume), as well as a community building service. You'll be able to find people of similar interests and skill levels and then make clans to compete with and against each other and compete in tournaments. It is like social networking just for Call of Duty players that will greatly alter your matchmaking results so you'll be able to find players more similar to yourself instead of just getting thrown to the wolves like most multiplayer games.
Compete - Both in-game and real world prizes are being promised for users of all skill levels. The idea is that instead of struggling against skilled players, you can play against a bunch of scrubs and actually have fun. And at the same time, you'll still be rewarded.
Improve - Elite is also being touted as a sort of personal coach that will help you improve. You'll obviously improve simply by playing with people closer to your skill level, but the game will offer additional information based on your stats that will help you get better at the game.
What About the Premium Elite Service?
So, if online play in Call of Duty will still be free (other than your Xbox Live subscription), and most of the Elite features will be free, what exactly will Activision charge for with the premium membership? All we really know is this, taken from the press release -
"Call of Duty Elite will offer a premium membership with a wide range of state-of-the-art services, exclusive entertainment programming and all-inclusive game content for less than the cost of any comparable online entertainment service currently in the market."
As to what exactly that means, your guess is as good as ours. They didn't say how much it will cost, or what you'll get. Rumors indicate it could be as simple as special in-game tags or camo patterns or as big as getting new maps earlier / cheaper. We don't know for sure yet.
CoD: Elite Beta Coming to CoD: Black Ops Summer 2011
To test the service, CoD: Black Ops will get an update to serve as the beta test for Elite later this Summer. You can sign up for the beta here - Call of Duty: Black Ops Elite Beta Sign Up
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