Call of Duty: Elite

What is it? What will it do? How much will it cost? Will it really be worth it? All of these questions raced through my mind from the moment I first heard of Call of Duty Elite, which at the time was called “Project Beachhead”. These questions were all answered after spending most of the day at the Treyarch studios.

The simple answer to the first question is, Elite is a service that will allow COD fans an easier way to connect to other players based on similar interests. Elite allows people to create or join groups based on their own particular interests or search for a group that has already been created We were asked that day to give something we were interested in and one of the guys answered "Volkswagen". The word Volkswagen was typed into the box and the group was created. So now people can be a member of the Volkswagen group and people can connect based on their interest to connect with other Volkswagen enthusiast.

Another cool feature of Elite is the gamer having an overload of information and stats at their fingertips in real time. Elite updates the stats as soon as your match ends. It will allow you to see a heat map showing you where you got into gun fights with other players including kills and deaths. Elite will give you the tools to study your game and the game of others so you can improve your FPS skills.

Other things Elite will have include theater mode and online tournaments. Theater mode will allow users to share their game play video with others even if they are not on your xbox or PSN friends list. The online tournaments are something that you can "enlist" in. The tournaments have "real prizes" that a person could win such as T-shirts, iPads, and I even saw one where you could win a vehicle. A gamer can check the leader boards for each tournament they are enlisted in to check their progress in the tournament.

While we were being shown the basics of Elite, the question of cost came up. We were told by someone at Treyarch, if we were going to buy the map packs anyways we would be stupid not to get the Elite paid for subscription. The map packs will come as a part of the paid subscription to Elite. We were not told what exactly would be in the paid portion of Elite but we were told that the map packs would be available at no additional cost.

Elite will be an extensive service with a lot of capabilities, quite a few which will be free and integrated into MW3. Elite will not affect the multiplayer for Black Ops or MW3.

The best thing is there will be a beta this summer. So to answer the question "is it really worth it?" sign up for for the Call of Duty Elite beta here! The one thing people should know is that you need to have Call of Duty:Black Ops to properly test Elite.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

I have been a huge fan of Call of Duty since I first started playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Although my love for the game didn’t really kick off until I played the Multiplayer (MP), which almost never happened. My friend convinced me to give MP a try after I had already beaten the campaign.

If my friend hadn’t been there to party up with me on most nights I probably would have given up on COD4 because I utterly sucked. I hated playing team death match (TDM) because I was always so negative I didn’t want to be the reason my team lost, fortunately my buddy was good enough to carry us both. I must also mention that COD4 was my FIRST experience within the first person shooter (FPS) realm of gaming.

After a few months of playing COD4 on TDM and learning every nook and cranny of the maps my buddy once again pushed my limits and said let’s play Hardcore Search and Destroy (S&D). My immediate thoughts were “HELL NO, I’m not that good on TDM and you only get 1 life per round in S&D, I’ll never get any XP” and that is exactly what happened at first. After a while I got where I could get 2 to 3 kills over the course of the match and with the addition of Hardcore S&D in our repertoire spawned a new addition to our enjoyment of the game….LAN parties.

We all worked at the local college which had large rooms and a lot of bandwidth so we came up with the idea of all bringing our PS3’s up to the college and sit in the same room and play S&D and not have to worry about us being dead and not being able to chat via the headset. For a good year, every couple of months, we would all spend 12 hours on a Saturday at the college playing COD4 in the same room and those were some of the best times gaming, though our wives/girlfriends quickly tired of us spending so much time with “a video game”

COD4 was a drug, plain and simple. I could not go a single day without playing the game, even if it was just three or four matches which it was rarely that short of a period of time online. I spent a lot of money on other games trying to recreate the feeling that COD4 gave me every time I played it. Even the next year when Call of Duty: World at War came out it could not recreate that feeling. I played it long enough to beat the single campaign and get almost all the way top of the ranks before you prestige for the 1^st time. No matter what game I put in my PS3 it never stayed long because COD4 would go back in so I could get some more.

While we were doing the LAN parties regularly I created a 2^nd PSN profile so I could rank that one up as well so someone could have a decent profile to play on for the LAN parties because not everyone had a PS3 at that time but they still wanted to play the game. So I started ranking up in 2 different profiles and got my primary profile, luckkyd, to the pinnacle. I made it to level 55 10^th prestige. I worked pretty hard after that trying to get my 2^nd profile to same level before November of 2009 because I just knew I would NEVER touch COD4 again after Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) came out because Infinity Ward was making this one so it was going to be like COD4 only better and while I have enjoyed MW2 a lot, even the latest game by infinity ward couldn't replace my love for COD4.