Call of Duty Elite membership service to launch with Modern Warfare 3

A new community-based service named Call of Duty Elite will launch on November 8, 2011, alongside Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, as Activision look to keep over 30 million Call of Duty players entranced, and also charge them for premium membership.

Developed by Activision’s new Beachhead studio, Call of Duty Elite is looking to social networks like Facebook and Twitter for inspiration:

“The average Call of Duty player spends 58 minutes per day playing multiplayer. That is more than the average Facebook user spends per day on Facebook. And yet, right now, there are very few tools to unite and super charge that social community,” said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing. “Whether it’s allowing you to connect with your friends, or people of a similar skill level, people who live in your city, people who share your favourite passions, join competitive clans or social groups, or upload, view and comment on the incredible mass of player-generated content, or watch and comment on exclusive created content, Call of Duty Elite will give people more ways to connect with fellow players than ever before. Elite will also allow players of every level to improve their game with an intuitive suite of tools, and compete in tournaments for both real and virtual prizes.”

So what does that actually mean?

• Mobile and web elements of Call of Duty Elite will impact on your actual in-game experience, so expect some mobile apps and probably Facebook games which might help you unlock new elements or level up.
• Call of Duty Elite will apparently turn multiplayer into a ‘true social network’ to compete against friends, players of similar skill and with similar interests, join groups, clans and play in organised tournaments. You’ll also be able to track all the progress and activity of your network via the web.
• It will provide events and competitions with tiers based on abailities to aim for in-game and real-word prizes.
• You’ll also get a dynamic strategy guide, with tools, info and your latest stats and performances. It will also chronicle your gameplay history in every Call of Duty game in the future, tracking every kill.

Apparently many key features will be available for free, but there will be a premium membership with a ‘wide range of state of the art services, exclusive entertainment programming and all-inclusive game content’ – so that’ll be DLC, new features before they get publicly released and some developer videos?

The FPSPrestige take on Call of Duty Elite:

The business side of videogames has changed a lot over recent years, and we don’t feel badly about companies needing to make money to pay for employees and development, even when they’re looking to make more cash from the biggest selling FPS series around.

A membership service could be really useful – certainly the likes of Halo have benefitted from allowing interaction via websites as well as on your Xbox, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 and the Sony Xperia Play Playstation phone have shown the direction of gaming as something that runs across your phone, console and anywhere else they can reach.

But…

Aren’t most of these elements already available in exchange for the money we pay to Microsoft for Xbox Live? Xbox Live is effectively a social network for my gaming friends, available online and on mobile phones, which tracks their progress through all their games, via Achievements. And any FPS game has to include some form of skill-based ranking and matchmaking these days, along with stats tracking. Black Ops has more statistics than you could probably ever need, for example.

But there are some potentially good elements – additional support for clans would be nice, and the promise of constant tournaments and events is a lot to live up to, but does mean there’s something more than grinding out the 15th prestige to look forward to. And being able to track in-game stats for our entire CoD career would be interesting, seeing whether we’re actually getting better with each game.

The big worry is that we’ll end up with tiers of players restricted by whether they’re in Elite, or paid up members. That splitting hasn’t been too much of a problem with CoD DLC so far, as most active players are keen to pay up and download the new map packs, but could become more apparent with Elite, and although 7 million CoD players every day may seem a heck of a lot, not everyone has a friends list full of Black Ops junkies.

But time will tell – particularly as Battlefield 3 looks to be building on the Battlefield series without adding a lot of community bells and whistles. Admittedly, more than half the time our Battlefield stats are unavailable, and finding friends in Bad Company 2 is more work than it probably should be sometimes, but considering many felt the actual gameplay of Black Ops and game mechanics weren’t a huge improvement on Modern Warfare 2, adding too many additional considerations and trying to meld the work of the various studios involved could become a problem for the Call of Duty series