Call Of Duty: Elite – More Stats Than You Can Shake A Stick At

Last week Activision spilled the beans on Call Of Duty: Elite which Beachhead Studios have been beavering away on for the past 2 years. In fact they were created just to develop and manage it. According to Beachhead, they created Elite to enrich the multiplayer community within the Call Of Duty games.

Elite has been built to fully integrate with Modern Warfare 3 as well as supporting earlier Call of Duty games like Black Ops.

Think of it as a Call Of Duty career management system. It keeps track of what you’ve been up to in-game and can help you improve through analysis of your own performance stats as well as providing detailed information on all the maps and weapons available. Or you could just nerd out on all the numbers.

Approximately 90 seconds after finishing a multiplayer match your record will be updated with all this new information. Given the vast number of online matches currently taking place, this is a pretty impressive feat.

Activision have said that Elite will be accessible from the internet, mobile phones (e.g. iPhone app), from your TV and in-game. I don’t know what the difference is between in-game and on your TV, as no further information was provided. The full premium service will be subscription based, the details of which, including pricing will be made available over the next few months. To sweeten the deal, all Modern Warfare 3 map packs (i.e. paid-for DLC) will be included in the subscription. It was stressed that multiplayer will remain free and part of MW3 when you buy the game.

Call of Duty: Elite is split into 4 distinct sections:

1. Career – This is where you can pore over all your performance stats like games played, win/loss ratio, personal bests, recent performance and a weapon performance matrix. You can also compare your self against other players. The feature I liked the the most was the heat map that is generated after every multiplayer match. This allows you to analyse the locations of every kill/death and spot bottlenecks.
2. Connect – This is the video section where you can link your YouTube account to Elite, post your favourite Call of Duty videos and also view those posted by the community and the developers themselves.
3. Compete – Sign up to all the Call of Duty events that are available here. You can search by event type, date etc. Some of the events I looked at had an iPad 2 as the prize or even the Call of Duty Jeep Wrangler. There were also a few screenshot events for those of us that don’t have ninja FPS skills.
4. Improve – Detailed maps and overviews, tips, stats and video guides for all the weapons and items in the game can be found here. This section should help you plan your tactics for each of the maps so you don’t get lost and know how to best use your weapons.

Here’s a video showing Call of Duty: Elite in action. I strongly suggest muting the video and just watch the pictures.

I was impressed with how well Call of Duty: Elite manages the huge amounts of data that is already available for each player and all the data that is generated from each game. It’s doing some serious number crunching in the background. However, I was a bit disappointed that you couldn’t save the heat maps for off-line analysis which could do with the maps from the improve section.

I will be interested to see how many people will sign up to Call Of Duty: Elite given that Valve Software’s Steam platform provides a similar level of service for free. I’m sure Activison would argue that Elite provides far more in terms of player stats that Steam does at the moment. But can you really be arsed to wade through and make use of all that data?

You can now register for an invite to the Call Of Duty: Elite beta.

Screenshots:

Call Of Duty: Elite will be available during Autumn 2011.

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