Connect, Compete, Improve

Los Angeles, CA, USA

When I first heard of the Call of Duty franchise possibly charging for online services, I had mixed feelings. A Call of Duty MMO? I couldn't fathom the thought. I still can't. While in no way do I dislike MMOs, Call of Duty didn't seem like one of those franchises that needed it. All my worries, for the most part, subsided when OMGN went to see Activision's presentation of Call of Duty Elite at E3. COD Elite is a community-based service in which players can look up their stats, friends' stats, form clans, form tips on different maps, guns, and more.

One of the main services Elite has to offer is extensive stat tracking. Currently, the career statistics are very similar to Call of Duty: Black Ops with even more detail. Players can find other players by searching for them and then compare statistics. Another addition to Elite is the ability to find contests. The contests that were presented so far were very similar to Black Ops' contracts, such as using a particular weapon a certain amount of times, and giving you a specific amount of time (across matches) to do them. However, instead of just getting in-game currency as a reward, the prizes can be in-game items or even real life prizes. And we were told these "prizes" weren't just simple T-shirts and hats either; they should be more along the lines of things like, oh, Jeeps. Another very nice feature added to Elite was the ability to change your loadouts on the fly prior to starting the game. Also, some contests even involve taking screenshots instead of taking away from a player's K/D count.

Elite offers very robust features when looking for other people to play or join a clan. Players can search for a clan list, and each clan will have its own associated profile, which includes the statistics of that clan, such as total combined kills. Clans can also have their own set of colors that are (hopefully) shown in-game. These colors will also be unique to each clan because once it's taken, no one else can have it.

For players looking for a little help, Elite offers coaching. Elite can show special points of interest in maps, such as where you died, where most of your kills landed, which weapon you keep getting killed by, and even have full videos dedicated to each gun.

Elite also takes Black Op's (and possibly MW3's) theater mode and integrates it with Elite's YouTube-like video sharing feature, complete with video tagging and all the silly comments you can handle.

Elite is looking to be compatible with profiles across all platforms (360, PS3, and PC) on Black Ops, and most likely future games, such as Modern Warfare 3. The Elite service itself can be used at www.callofduty.com/elite, and there are plans for it to have phone apps for iOS, Android tablets, or any other smartphone devices, as well as Facebook account linking. Elite is currently open for beta testing applications.

We were told that most of the services that were presented to us were free; Activision was hesitant to tel us what was actually going to be charged, which may be the ultimate deal-breaker for anyone thinking of putting any dough toward this. Most of the services that were presented can be done already, albeit less organized. Still, it is nice to have them all in one website, so I think there shouldn't be any reason not to use what Elite has to offer for free -- whatever that will be.