Elite, the social network/video-making/DLC-flogging wrapper for Call of Duty due to launch with Contemporary Fighting Techniques 3 next week, won’t be turning up on PC at the same time as the game itself. Why? It’s because you’re so insecure. And so you should be, with that> nose. Oh, sorry, I’ve got it wrong – it’s because the devs think the PC’s insecure. That’s not an insult, calm down. They’re just worried about cheaters hacking the system: the precious statistics must be protected! (more…)

Look, I don’t want this to be another groundhog day. I don’t want the comments thread to fill up with people going ‘Call of Duty is boring’ and then some other people saying “that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” I just want you to only bother watching this video of Modern Warfare 3′s ‘Spec Ops’ co-op mode if you honestly have a real interest in Modern Warfare 3. If you don’t, stop reading. Why are you still reading? You don’t even care! STOP READING. And don’t you dare> comment. I can delete your words with a single button-click, you know. (more…)

Activision boss Big Bobby K is unsurprisingly out on the campaign trail for Modern Warfare 3, and that means any journalists who manage to get past his Nazgûl guards inevitably attempt to ask him how he thinks EA’s rivalrous Battlefield 3 is going to compare.

Here’s what he said. It almost certainly won’t make you say incredibly rude things about a man you’ve never met.
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Call of Duty Elite, the social networking/clan-organising thingy for COD multiplayer, got a whole lot of backs up when it was unveiled the other week – the prevailing, Chinese-whispered sense being that we’d be expected to fork out to get the full CoD multiplayer experience. With the waters very much muddied, Activision seem to be in fire-fighting mode – now explicitly stating just what will be free. Activision also reckon that “we believe that the free elements of Call of Duty Elite will be superior to any free service currently on the market.”

Oh, and they just called you a hater.
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It was always going to happen, and now it has. The nature of a corporation is never to sit still and be content with its lot – it’s to forever look to ways to make more money from what it has. (If RPS had a scrap of sense, we’d have launched a couple of spin-offs by now, but a corporation we are not). Activision was never going to let the world’s biggest gaming franchise stay the same size – its duty to its shareholders, and to a far less extent to its employees, is to make its IP as profitable as possible. With several of its divisions and titles recently axed and even WoW subscriptions in decline (by an apparently tiny 5%, but the difference between revenues increasing and revenues decreasing is a fundamental one for shareholder confidence), the publisher is almost required to milk a little more out of its remaining cashcows. On the one hand, you can’t blame them for introducing Call of Duty: Elite, a premium subscription service (though its basic features are free) which adds various community and content goodies to its shooter series’ frighteningly popular multiplayer mode.

On the other hand, it’s hard to not to feel a little dirty about Elite, isn’t it?
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So after waiting a few hours to scowl at the Wall Street Journal for breaking the embargo, Activision have now officially taken the lid off Call of Duty: Elite, which means its actual features, rather than a pithy, video-based glossing-over of them, can be listed. Here’s the horse’s mouth breakdown of what the service actually entails.
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The day has come: Activision has finally introduced Plan B. Plan B is much like Plan A, in that it also involves making an absolute crapton of money out of Call of Duty. This time, it’s called Call of Duty Elite, and it’s a social networking, clan-arranging, video-sharing, stat-analysing online service for COD multiplayer. Some aspects for it will be free; others will involve a paid subscription. The gaming world had a sharp intake of breath this morning, and you probably will too.

There’s an *apparently* leaked YouTube trailer of Elite below, but as I believe the publications who Activision chose to show the service to are under some sort of embargo, you’d better hurry and watch it before it either gets pulled or just posted everywhere else anyway.
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I guess Activision have been pretty good at rolling with the hard punch they took when Kotaku controversially busted open most of Modern Warfare 3′s secrets the other week. A selection of trailers has now been followed by a preview day for the press that Activision’s prepared to talk to (sigh). Here’s Eurogamer’s and VG24/7′s impressions, both of which suggest a pretty familiarly hyper-scripted experience, but a bigger, brasher, noisier approach to setpieces and a focus on urban combat and the explosive destruction of global landmarks in the UK, US and Germany.

You know! Anyway, some screenshots for you – and what I believe are the first official ones.
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