Call of Duty Elite Seeing Changes for Black Ops II

With over a year to see what works and what doesn’t, Activision will be administering some changes to the Call of Duty Elite service for the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops II from Treyarch. The changes are being made in an effort to “further unite, engage and delight our player community,” according to Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg.

Currently, the Call of Duty Elite service offers both free and premium features to its player base. The premium features are highlighted with the inclusion of the entire season of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 downloadable content. Those who were premium Elite members from the start enjoyed content drops weeks before others, and at a slightly discounted rate in comparison to full price collection packs made available to everyone else later. There are other premium features as well, but much of the focus for the value of Elite was placed on the early access to these maps and it’s price compared to the collection packs.

With Black Ops II, all the aforementioned premium features aside from the maps will now be free. This means that features like Clan Operations and special competitions are now a part of the Elite package. Essentially, there will be no “free” and “premium” divisions of Call of Duty Elite anymore, with everyone who is a part of Elite enjoying the same features. Activision has provided a list of some of the new and evolving features coming to Elite in Black Ops II:

• Player HQ – Track Call of Duty: Black Ops II performance with rich game statistics, including enhanced match information such as heat maps and recent match data; track challenges and extensively modify your classes like never before using Treyarch’s new Pick 10 Create-a-Class system.
• Clan HQ– Join an existing clan or start your own, invite friends and then take part in Call of Duty: Black Ops II clan competitions with cool digital prizing.
• Zombies Support – For the millions of Zombies fans out there, now you can track your Zombies personal statistics and compare it to other players’ around the world.
• Call of Duty Elite TV – Launching with tablet support with Call of Duty: Black Ops II, the new Call of Duty Elite TV will deliver a renewed community focus featuring developer tips and strategy programming, custom class overviews and more.
• Social Sharing and Notifications – With Call of Duty Elite’s new notification system, you can stay updated with what is going on in Call of Duty: Black Ops II, as well as communicate directly with your clan. Map packs then will be sold separately, and will not be a part of Elite in any form this time around. Instead map packs can be purchased separately like normal, or a season pass can be purchased to get the map packs at a discount versus purchasing separately. Activision is planning four future map packs due to come out in 2013. Each map pack is set to feature both multiplayer maps and zombie content, much like in the first Call of Duty: Black Ops. All four map packs can be purchased separately for 1200 MSP, or all together in the Season Pass for 4000 MSP, a saving of 800 MSP.

Activision introduces us to what’s in store for Elite in Call of Duty: Black Ops II with the following trailer.



In summary, Elite will feature much of the same stat tracking and social features found in Battlefield 3 or the Halo series, with a separate season pass like many of today’s games. Those who want additional maps/content are still paying for it, and still have an option at paying a bit less with the Season Pass. Those who opt to not pay for further content will enjoy more features than they had previously. The only downside (in comparison with previous Elite pricing and structure), is that there will be no season pack included with the collector’s edition of the game like for Modern Warfare 3, which bundled Elite alongside other physical and digital goodies. The Black Ops II collector’s editions have some special content of their own too of course, which we detailed here. If you want more specifics on Elite, such as how these changes affect previous Call of Duty titles, you can visit http://www.callofduty.com/elite for more.

The future is black as Call of Duty: Black Ops II drops on November 13th.

Thanks to the community members who sent this info in.