14 DAY TRIAL // Even more new details about Call of Duty Elite have been revealed, this time coming from the director of Activision's Beachhead studio, which is hard at work getting the new online service ready for release later this year.
Call of Duty Elite is set to change the way players of Call of Duty games interact with the multiplayer mode, offering not just stat tracking or improvement strategies, but also opportunities to socialize with others, enter in competitions or gain exclusive in-game items.
As you can imagine, Call of Duty Elite is extremely important to Activision, so the Beachhead studio took plenty of measures to ensure that the service is secure and that nothing wrong will happen with the personal information of its users, unlike the recent PlayStation Network scandal.
"From a developer standpoint we put an extremely high premium on security," Chako Sonny, studio boss at Beachhead said to Eurogamer. "We have dedicated staff focusing on that from an architectural standpoint, making sure nothing we design is exposed, and we're also making sure that we're securing the events and competitions that will eventually become part of the service."
While security is important for the Beachhead studio, the company is also focusing on trying to differentiate between the features that will be offered for free to users and the ones that will be available for a monthly subscription.
Sonny emphasizes that the premium features won't be any essential things, but will make users realize that it is worth investing a monthly fee in order to access them and enrich their Call of Duty Elite experience.
"You can argue about what's invaluable and what's not invaluable all day long," he said. "Our philosophy is that what we need to be able to do is say, if we're doing something that's premium, it needs to earn it. It needs to be something that when the player sees what we're up to, sees the work that's involved and the reinvestment going back into the service, or the content; they look at it and say, I understand why that's valuable."
Call of Duty Elite is going to see a beta stage released this summer, while the official launch of the service is scheduled for November 8, right when the full pledge Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 game is released.