But starting this fall, series publisher Activision will offer a service you can pay for each month: the premium grade version of something called Call of Duty: Elite (don't panic... there's a free version coming too).
Starting as a beta this summer and then launching on November 8, 2011—the same day as the next Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3—Call of Duty: Elite will be a PC and mobile service that lets players track their stats, compete for real and virtual prizes, and form both social and gaming groups with players from across multiple CoD games.
Elite will be available in two tiers of service, one for paying and one for non-paying Call of Duty multiplayer fanatics. While all of the perks of membership are yet to be announced, that paying group may never have to pay for a Call of Duty map pack separately again.
At a glance, Elite resembles Bungie.net, the richly-detailed stat tracking service for that other mighty first-person-shooter series, Halo. But the top people behind the Elite project, including the heads of Beachhead Studios, an outfit dedicated exclusively to building and supporting Elite, promise that their service will prove to be the best of its kind, transcending expectations of websites for multiplayer video games.
The Elite service is, at its most basic, a very fancy website. It will primarily be accessed through users' web browsers, though Activision is planning to offer some sort of Elite app for iOS and Android devices.
Elite will include stat-tracking, lots of social-networking options and a bevy of competitions, some of which will be organized like the season of a professional sport.
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Based on what we've been shown of Elite so far, the service looks like it will give CoD addicts a trove of data and networking options that they will surely enjoy. It doesn't offer anything to the single-player-only CoD gamer. It also doesn't yet have any meta-game in its own right, no way, for example, to "play" Ellite on your iPhone in a manner that would let you beat other Elite gamers or affect your standing in a proper Call of Duty game. The top developers on the service told us that game-like extensions and other unseen features may well be a part of future evolutions of Elite. For the beta, though, players should expect the features listed here, retro-fitted to suit Black Ops. An expanded suite of features will be offered when Elite launches alongside Modern Warfare 3. (Update: Elite will continue to also connect to Black Ops after the service launches in November, according to a spokesperson for the service.)
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