I was lucky enough to see Elite, previously codenamed Project Beachhead, before I went off to see Modern Warfare 3 at Activision’s pre-E3 event. There’s a ton to talk about when it comes to Elite, but the bullet point that’ll grab headlines and cause riots is the cost.
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Before you all start setting stuff on fire, let’s all chill out here for a second and actually look at what they’re charging for. I was lucky enough to see Call of Duty: Elite in action a little while back at Activision’s pre-E3 blow-out, and I left relatively impressed with what was on show, though exactly how impressed will depend on the price – which Activision are not yet confirming.
So, what is it? Well, Call of Duty: Elite is an expansion on the current Call of Duty multiplayer experience. To be clear, at this time Activision has no plans whatsoever to remove or charge for features you already find in Call of Duty: Black Ops or would expect to find in Modern Warfare 3. All those features will still come free in every box, with no EA-style ‘online pass’ required to play – new or preowned, you can jump into multiplayer right away.
What Elite adds is based off a core concept of four areas – Career, Connect, Compete and Improve. Activision see this as a road-map for any Call of Duty player in their becoming better at the game and a key path for them in securing the future of the Call of Duty brand - and Elite is a huge part of this. Previously in Call of Duty games it was possible to track your basic statistics like Recent Performance and Personal Bests, Dan Bunting from Treyarch explains, but with Elite they can do far more than that.
That brings me onto the first part of Elite – Career. I mentioned Treyarch, the studio behind last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops – and that are going to be fully compatible with Elite. While much of Elite has been built with the upcoming Modern Warfare 3 in mind, it’s fully backwards compatible with Black Ops and will be forwards-compatible with Call of Duty entries in the future.
The Career pane within Elite tracks your career across the entire of Call of Duty, and can be broken down to be seen on a game-to-game basis. All of the statistics stored here and all the ones I’ll go on to mention are described as being ‘platform agnostic’ meaning that a PS3 owner can compare their stats directly against Black Ops or MW3 players from PC or 360 easily.
Career is pretty simple, but Connect is where things start to get interesting. Connect lets you connect to other COD players regardless of platform and regardless of what supported title they’re playing. You can create or join groups – so we could start a Strategy Informer group that you lot could join, or you could join a group based on your hobbies – Activision demoed a group titled #Photography for photography enthusiasts.
The idea is this helps you to find COD players with similar interests. Within groups there’s leaderboards, communal statistics like an overall K/D spread for the entire group and a comments page where people within the group can chat.
While you might think this stuff should come under Compete, Connect also lets you connect directly to other players and check out your performance against theirs. Any of the many statistics available through Elite can be compared, and you can mark friends or rivals to watch them more closely and track how their game is changing.
Compete has little to do with small-scale competition, though, and everything to do with massive-scale stuff. Elite will be home to Events, Sweepstakes and other competitions. It might be a competition to see how many knife kills can be racked up in a match, or a screenshot competition with a particular theme – Activision want to ensure there’s Competitions everyone can compete in, even if they’re not a top-tier COD player.
Winning these competitions will net in-game and Elite rewards like badges to display on your profile and there will be also real prizes up for grabs – two demo competitions had a car and iPad 2’s up for grabs for good performance.
Improve is where Elite aims to earn that subscription fee, though. It’s designed to make you a better Call of Duty player with vast, ridiculously detailed statistics covering every aspect of your average battle in the game.
There’s top-down views of all the maps that are fully interactive and can be overlaid with information on where objectives and key points of interest are. Heatmaps can also be applied to maps to show exactly where people are biting it for any match you’ve been in.
Every single Weapon, Perk, Kill Streak Reward, Mod and Attachment available has detailed statistics available about how you and the wider community put them to use. You can see exactly how many kills you’re nailing with one weapon compared to another and figure out if that’s the right choice for you to head into battle with next time.
If you love a particular weapon or Kill Streak and you aren’t performing all that well, Elite has you covered. There’s text and video guides for every single thing in the game that will be regularly updated with emerging strategies from the pros and the developers, and watching and reading this stuff is bound to help you to do what the section title wants you to do and get better.
The video guides I saw in Elite were slickly produced and nice-looking, and while time constraints stopped me from reading in too much detail there seemed to be a ton of text information on every weapon in the game. The entire Elite website has great presentation and loads very quickly, and it took under two minutes for a match I played to then appear on the site in great detail, so Activision have clearly spent a great deal of the two years development time making it fast and user-friendly.
The Improve section is designed to allow you to “identify your failings and act on them to become a better player,” Activision reps tell us. There are an awful lot of people out there who put a great deal of time into Call of Duty, and something tells me that the hardcore base will love drowning in these very detailed stats.
Press went hands-on with a version of Black Ops tooled up to send stats to Elite, and that’s what’ll be entering into a public beta this summer. It worked well, and all the stats mentioned above loaded into the system quickly and were easy to view. To compare it to something else out there, Elite as-is seems like a more in-depth take on what Bungie and Microsoft has been offering with Bungie.net and Halo Waypoint for the Halo titles for a while now.
The ability to view Elite from multiple places will surely come in handy, with Activision planning to have Elite features viewable in-game, in-browser and also in a mobile app which was being demoed on iPhone at the event.
When Elite hits, the main reason to break out your wallet will of course be Modern Warfare 3, as while Black Ops is compatible MW3 and Elite have been built in tandem to work together. As such, while MW3 features all the multiplayer features from MW2 out of the box free, if you have an Elite subscription you’ll get more out of it with MW3 than with Black Ops.
One major feature of Elite in MW3 is going to come in the form of private groups and clans. While the groups mentioned earlier for Black Ops only exist within Elite to track stats, in MW3 there’ll be ways to build a clan or group in Elite and then take that identity into the game properly.
MW3 will have new playlists to properly support Group vs. Group and Clan vs. Clan play as well as leagues and competitions specifically for large groups of players. While we weren’t given more detail, we were promised the statistics on offer would be improved over the Black Ops implementation too, with the game able to feed more information to Elite.
In addition to that, all map packs will be included as part of the Elite subscription. While they’ll still be sold separately (presumably for $10 a pack) Elite members will get them for nothing. Activision are keen to underline the fact that the full ‘box experience’ of a Call of Duty game is still there, and Elite is not a requirement – what they’re offering is extra.
After two years development at an all-new studio, Elite has been an expensive investment for Activision – and it only gets more so, with the company planning to set up a 24/7 worldwide service team for people having issues with the service.
If that investment will turn good for them is going to be a defining point of how companies monetize online play, so Elite is definitely one to watch regardless of how big a COD fan you are. A big sticking point is a still-unanswered question: How much? I loved the feature set shown, but the price is going to determine if I’d ever touch the service.
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That and more information on extra features and content for the service is due to detailed properly going forward and as multiplayer information on Modern Warfare 3 is released.
The Black Ops version of Elite will enter open Beta this summer, and the service will launch fully alongside Modern Warfare 3 for PS3, 360 and PC this November.
