14 DAY TRIAL // Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is one of the biggest video game launches of the fall season but it seems that for publisher Activision Blizzard the release of the accompanying Elite service might be the more important event.
The developers working on it at the Beachhead studio are saying that having a solid and successful beta stage is crucial for the service and allows the team to understand exactly what players are looking for in the game and how they might change aspects of its before the official launch date.
Jamie Berger, who is the vice president for digital strategy at Acivision, has told Eurogamer that, “The most surprising result for me was how quickly people would try to find exploits. It was astonishing for me, how important it is for us to make sure that people are not cheating in competitions.”
It seems that competitive Call of Duty players are ready to cheat in order to make their statistics look better than those of their rivals and presumably Elite will need a lot of work post-launch to keep it secure and fair to all those who use it.
Choco Sonny, who is the leader of the Beachhead studio working on Elite, added, “What's interesting is there's nobody in the same space. There are people from other spaces doing similar things that we're trying to pull best practices from; we know that companies like Netflix, Google and Amazon manage server deployments that are massive, and we're trying to learn what they do.”
The developers are also saying that the social side of Elite will become very important after the service launches and are already planning expansions for the Group feature and new ways of discovering like minded gamers.
Elite will arrive in early November, just like Modern Warfare 3, and will offer a lot of content, from DLC to television like series, for those who are willing to pay a subscription fee.