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.