entertainment book hotels: Call of Duty Elite Adds Social Layer to Hit Gaming Series [PICS]

elite image Video game company Activision has finally revealed Elite, a new social layer for its wildly popular Call of Duty games. Elite was designed to unite the massive community of Call of Duty players as well as provide tools to help gamers of all levels improve their skills.

Cross-platform services are becoming more popular as video game designers realize their community isn?t console-specific. Web players want to test their mettle against console players and vice versa. Elite goes beyond the game to include social networks like Facebook. Users can link up their Facebook accounts to Elite to pull in Likes and automatically find friends who are also using the service.

Elite also introduces groups and clans, which will play a much larger role in Modern Warfare 3, the next Call of Duty game. Groups are largely open and can be based on anything. Like eating lobster? You can join or create a ?Lobster? group. Like playing with machine guns? There?s a group for that. Same with ?Yankees? or ?Los Angeles.? Groups operate similar to fan pages on Facebook. Users can track and compare themselves to these mini-communities of players. Users can join a total of 64 groups.

Clans are more limited. Users can only belong to one clan and there is a cap on how many players can be in a clan. The Call of Duty folks were tight-lipped about how clans will play into the next iteration but promised they would be key.

We recently sat down with the game?s designers for a demo of Elite. The room, a penthouse hotel room in Manhattan, featured rows of huge black computers with the Elite skull logo. There, they talked about their goals and plans for Elite.

The service is available on web browsers, consoles and mobile apps and will work with all future Call of Duty games, including Black Ops, the most recent game in the series. Elite features four main sections: Career, Connect, Compete and Improve.

The service will launch in full along with Modern Warfare 3 in November, but a beta is already open for use with Black Ops. Elite is largely free, though a premium membership is needed to get full functionality. That membership also includes all downloadable content released in the future, but it still might be a little pricey for the casual user.

A Sneak Peek at Call of Duty Elite

View As Slideshow ?

Career PlayerCard

Elite tracks everything you do in-game: Every kill, every death, where it happened, who did it, and with what weapon. These stats are then crunched on the fly and fed back to the player. The playercard is basically a Call of Duty "baseball card," complete with your win percentage, badges and rewards. Think of it as a snapshot of your Call of Duty self.

Playercards also make up a large part of the mobile offerings. While the iPhone and iPad apps don't have full functionality, they do pull of these stats for display (re: show-offery).

Career Recent Matches

You can also pull up recent matches to see how you performed in individual play sessions. You can check the amount of points, even see where you spent most time with a heat map-like function of your movement. The bar underneath the map shows individual incidents (like kills or deaths) on a timeline so you can see how well you did during a stretch of time.

Career Leaderboard

It wouldn't be an online experience without a leaderboard. You can see how you stack up against the entire Call of Duty community or just among your friends or groups.

Connect Theater

Connect is the heart of the social experience. It's where users can find similar likes, join groups and share information via a news feed-like wall. The theater is where users can upload and share gameplay videos. It's connected with YouTube, so users can share clips internally through Elite as well as with the outside world.

Connect Groups

Groups are a lot like Facebook fan pages. Users can share their personal likes and join smaller communities with similar interests. You can also track your personal progress within these groups through separate leaderboards.

Compete Program Guide

Compete is a way to introduce real world prizes for distinguished play. There are two main types of competition: Events and Operations.

Events are short, one-off competitions. Some are based on play, others are based on uploading the best video to theater. The idea was to reward all players, even if you're not that great at the game.

Operations take place over a longer period of time and ultimately reward persistence over great play. If you stick it out long enough, you can rake in enough points to win. Prizes range from belt buckles to Jeeps.

Improve Tips

Improve is aimed at helping you, well, improve. The section above gives a breakdown of each weapon and some strategies on how best to use them in-game. Each weapon has a video lesson attached to it as well.

Improve Maps

You can also scout out maps ahead of time. These maps show where spawn points are, flag locations (for capture the flag) and general topography.

Improve Gear

You can also see a breakdown of every piece of gear in the game. Moreover, you can measure your own performance. Like using sniper rifles but can't hit the broad side of a barn? This section will let you know and help you get better.