Call of Duty: Elite Details

Call of Duty: Elite is the oft-rumored premium service for Call of Duty that Activision plans to roll out with Modern Warfare 3 in Fall 2011. It isn't quite what people expected, though. It won't make online COD multiplayer pay-to-play, and Elite won't actually require a monthly fee. It will offer additional features that you can pay for, but the core Elite service will be free. We have all of the details right here.

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

View the original article here

Xbox 360 Elite Trasfer

With the new Xbox 360 Elite on store shelves and now in gamer's hands, the question has been asked to me several times. "How exactly do you transfer game content, videos, arcade games, etc. to the Xbox 360 Elite from your old Xbox 360?" Turns out there are two methods, and each have their drawbacks. Microsoft has a transfer kit to transfer all of the contents to the new Xbox 360 Elite, the problem with this method is that you'll have to be connected to Xbox Live in order to actually use any of the content. So let us go over the options...

Getting your hand on one of these transfer kits is free, just head on over to the Xbox.com page that details the usage, and details how to obtain one for free. As stated above, this does come with a price, in order to play any data that was transferred over, you will need to be connected to Xbox Live, more than likely because Microsoft wants to track exactly what and when you are playing. This isn't such a big deal if you have an always on connection to the Internet, but if you'd like some privacy while you are playing, I recommend using the memory card transfer method listed below.

This is the option I used, and honestly, I haven't had any problems. The one drawback is depending on the capacity of your memory card (I used a 64 Megabit Card) you will not be able to move large save files, Arcade games, and other large items. This isn't really that big of a deal since the Xbox Live servers store what you have previously downloaded, and anything you have paid and downloaded in the past can be re-downloaded free of charge, The best for this option is that after you have transferred the material you can play it while either on-line or off-line.

First off, plug your Xbox 20 gig hard drive into the Elite console, and the go into Memory and select the 20 gig hard drive. Move the content you would like to move, including your gamer profile to the Memory Unit. Once the memory unit is filled, put the 120 gig hard drive in the console and begin moving everything to the 120 gig hard drive, with the exception of your gamer profile (if you have more content to move just repeat the above steps.

Once all of the content you would like to move has been moved, you can then transfer the gamer profile to the 120 gig hard drive. I recommend doing a format on the 20gig hard drive just in case there are files on it that contain confidential information.

There you have it, all of your content on the new Xbox 360 Elite, without the use of the transfer kit and without the need to be signed into Xbox Live to play. Keep a mental note, if you need to save your larger game saves, such as Oblivion, the top option is for you, since the save file is too large to fit on a memory card.

Any questions or comments please let me know.

source from About.com