I posted episode 071 of the One of Swords Podcast this morning, which includes an interview with two prominent people who have been working on Call of Duty Elite — Chacko Sonny, the head of development studio Beachhead, and Noah Heller, the product director of the service. Since I know everybody doesn’t have the time or desire to listen to podcasts, I transcribed the whole interview and saved it as a PDF for you to download if you like. Since that’s TL;DR for some people too, I have isolated some key excerpts below, tweaked for easy reading.
Chacko Sonny on why Elite exists:
Elite exists because people went back and looked at how there were these really diverse communities who, with every single Call of Duty game, were continuing to play all the prior games – and we wanted to figure out a way to unite them. We wanted to figure out a way to give people a single profile, a place to go to get everything that they wanted with Call of Duty. And that’s what Elite is.
Noah Heller on the main goal of Elite:
For Call of Duty Elite, the uber-question has been, how do we get people using this when they’re not playing the game? So if you get into work in the morning, you check out what your buddies did last night, maybe plan a clan match for when you get home. When you’re on the train, you’re seeing who is online, you’re looking at your loadouts, you’re looking at your performance. In the game itself, how do I get a clan member in this game right away? Every single sort of experience – as long as you’re thinking about Call of Duty, we’re thinking about how Elite can enhance that.
Chacko on MW3 integration:
As we continue to evolve the service past Black Ops, the integration with Modern Warfare 3 will let us do some really cool things [...] The identities that you create – these group affiliations and your player identity, as opposed to just being surfaced in Elite, will now be made visible in Modern Warfare 3 in some really really interesting ways.
Chacko on some of what Elite will offer for free:
For somebody who doesn’t want to be part of this premium membership, we’re adding a whole bunch of really cool stuff just because of the fact that you’re a Call of Duty multiplayer player. As an example, all the information on this career page, which gives you your identity within Call of Duty – your statistics, your match summary, your weapon performance – all that stuff, tremendously valuable to the player, that’s stuff’s going to be free. Also the idea of your social affiliations – the groups that you can create on the service. Again, that’s another area that will be free. And it doesn’t even end there; there’s a lot of other stuff that will be available to people who want to just participate with Elite with whatever is currently available for free.
Chacko on the subscription option:
We want it to be a no-brainer. We want it to be for somebody for whom Call of Duty is a lifestyle [...] this is their sport, their main hobby. We want them to look at this and say “Total no-brainer for me, because the service offers me value, and the DLC is going to be part of it.”
Noah Heller on DLC choice:
We sat down with a lot of people, from multiplayer leads at Treyarch and IW to business leadership at Activision, and the conversation we had was, “How do we make this a slam dunk for someone who buys DLC?” And one of the ways we make that a slam dunk is not taking away the option to buy DLC. But I think when the full offering is revealed to your listeners, if you’re a guy who likes DLC, you’ll be like, “Oh, this is an easy, easy decision.”
Noah on the Compete section’s Program Guide:
Our goal was to create challenges that could apply to any skill level player. So at the base level, we call these things Events. Events are about capturing the best screenshot, taking the best video, being at the game in the right time to play with the developer. And all of us have a chance to win – if you can capture a great screenshot, you can win an iPad.
Then at a slightly higher level we have Operations – stat-based challenges. So with an Operation you might have, who can get the most kills in 24 hours, or who can get the most headshots with a sniper rifle in 24 hours? The cool thing about these stat-based challenges – also think about captures in Capture the Flag or defends – is that they reward persistence. If Chacko is a fantastic player and I suck, I can beat Chacko, because I can have the persistence on capturing the flag or getting headshots or focusing my play.
Finally, for our most engaged players, we have Leagues. Leagues are kind of like Operations – they are stat-based competitions – but you’re competing against people of a similar skill level and it’s over the course of five or six weeks. It’s like a softball league. You show up each week, you compete in your division, and we crown a winner at the end of it.
Chacko on competition:
We don’t want people to look at the Compete section and say “Oh, it’s just going to be the best people or the guys who have K/D ratios over 2 that are going to win.” We very much want to make sure there’s a range of competitions available for people who can win regardless of whether or not you’re “the best.”
Chacko on how Elite will be moderated:
There’s an entire organization that is dedicated not only to administering the service – in other words, making sure that the competitions run correctly and making sure that prizes are available and making sure winners are judged correctly and all that sort of stuff – but as part of that organization’s responsibility, they will be reviewing content, reviewing things that get flagged, and make sure that the experience is great for everybody. We don’t want one person to mess up a competition or a feed of comments or somebody’s experience with the service.
Noah on leaderboards and multiplatform concerns:
You could import a Facebook friend into Elite, and he might be a PSN user and you’re a 360 user. And that’s cool; you guys can see each other and communicate. One thing we don’t do is mix the platforms on the same leaderboard, because it’s just not fair. Console players might be better at something, PC players have keyboard and mouse, so we want to keep the competition fair and we limit it to each platform. Right now, of course, we’re focused on 360, PC, and PS3. But other platforms will come in the future.
Noah on this summer’s beta:
What we’ll do with the beta is roll it out in waves. So, you know, folks who have callofduty.com accounts or other ways we find people, we’ll try to get you guys first. Then as we feel like it’s a good experience for everyone, we’ll make it wider and wider and hopefully everybody can get in by the end of the beta.
It’s a 30-minute interview, so there’s more. They also talk about what they learned from Blizzard, how non-hardcore players will find Elite useful, what they have in mind for the mobile clients, how they personally use Elite, and their favorite group so far. Also, I mention what I did to get busted already. If you want it all, listen to the podcast or check out the complete transcription. Going forward, I’ll keep adding info to my main Call of Duty Elite article as well.
