It’s hard to believe that any Call of Duty fan needs more Call of Duty in their life. With every new entry come massive sales, millions of hours spent glued to the television, and a few hundred haters. If you are truly an elite Call of Duty player, then Activision’s upcoming online feature may just turn you into a zombie—watch out.
This is a service to give the CoD fan more information, stats, events, and tips than ever before. It runs on an HTML 5 site and can be accessed on just about every device known to man, including tablets and phones. We are not talking about the basic kill stats that are available in the actual game; we’re talking about heat maps that show every little detail you could want to know about your performance. These maps will shows players where they died, when they died, who killed them, how they died, who they killed, and more. Taking that information a few steps further, you can find the areas where you died the most, pinpoint why you died, and check out your assassin’s strategies. Call of Duty Elite acts almost like a real-time strategy guide to help you climb higher through the levels.
The Career section of Call of Duty Elite gives you all of this information and essentially acts like an old school baseball card. Compare nearly every little detail with those you’ve killed, your friends, even your friends on Facebook (regardless if they are on the same console). One of the primary functions of Elite is to study the game and learn from those that consistently dominate you. For instance, if you use that heat map and learn a certain player constantly kills you, check out her loadout and checkout exactly how she’s owning your every move. You can even change your loadout online or from your phone (it’s then uploaded when you restart the game).
If you aren’t overly familiar with your new weapons, you can check out the Improvements section of Elite to get tips, videos, and stats on your gear. This seems like a great concept, especially since players may be able to provide some input. Everyone knows Call of Duty is an insanely popular franchise. The ability to upload videos to YouTube has proven to be extremely successful—some 80 million uploaded thus far—and the team behind Elite said the service will feature a simple tool that allows quick tags for players with in each video. They are then notified they have a starring role in the next great YouTube hit.
You can expect further features like group and clan support. You can essentially search for anything you like, say a sports team, and see if they have a group you can join. If not, you’ll create it and allow others to join you. This means that you can easily play along with people who like the Bears or the Lakers.
So now you are probably wondering how much this will all cost. Well, the team didn’t have any details, but after the presentation at E3 they said the vast majority of the content will be free. To keep players up on the latest CoD news, you will also be able to track events like sessions with developers or even events for prizes—those features seem likely to be a part of the premium package. It should be noted beta is slated for June and the service will work with both Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3, and the 3,487 forthcoming Call of Duty games.