14 DAY TRIAL // The new Elite subscription service for the Call of Duty series is, according to the developers working on the first-person shooter franchise, a way of offering the player base options and differentiating between the hardcore crowd and the casual players.
Speaking to Kotaku, Robert Bowling, the main creative director at developer Infinity Ward, stated, “I think we like to give the option to have that experience. But it’s been very important to me, personally, to have that as an option, that it’s not a ‘We are a subscription game’ or ‘We are not a subscription game’.”
He added, “It was about giving more flexibility to our hardcore without hindering the casual guys from enjoying it how they always enjoyed it.”
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has just received two new maps, called Liberation and Piazza, which will be offered only on the Xbox 360 from Microsoft for a 30-day period and only to those who have a subscription to Elite.
After that gamers on the PlayStation 3 and the PC will get the same content, while those who have not subscribed will have to wait even more, perhaps another month, to get access to the same maps.
Activision Blizzard has also offered a detailed launch schedule for the other 18 pieces of content that Call of Duty fans will be waiting for until September, with 6 new Spec Ops missions and two new game modes mixed in among maps.
When Elite was initially announced, the players base was annoyed to find that it now had to pay in order to get early access to the same content that was previously delivered simultaneously to everyone.
Access to Elite also allows fans of the series to get access to more detailed statistics about the way they play, better organize with friends and watch multimedia content linked to the first-person shooter.