Hello again everyone, sorry this article is coming a bit late,
As you might have heard, I recently attended a Call of Duty ELITE event as well as E3 2011. This article covers both.
The Call of Duty Elite Event:
The event was held at Exchange LA on the evening of June 6. The event was set up to be a sort of formal introduction to the service. The guys and girls that came were some of the community "VIP's" from the Call of Duty Black Ops MP Reveal Event and many of the guys that attended the IW MW3 Event a few weeks back. I will let the photos speak for themselves but I could tell that quite a bit of planning, preparation, and notably, money, went into making the event possible. I spent a good bit of time with Robert Bowling discussing PC stuff. I figured I would be more useful doing that instead of trying to wrap my brain around using a controller to play Black Ops on Xbox. Once again, I got the feeling that Rob really wants the game to do well on PC and knows what IW needs to do to make that happen. Although they aren't ready to make any announcements regarding PC specific features yet, Rob assured me that those details will be available as soon as decisions are finalized over at the studio. Interestingly, the studio is taking a different approach to developing MW3 multiplayer. Rob told me that from a design perspective, they are working on moving away from the MW2 model, an arguably spammy, campy, killstreak-oriented model and returning to a more CoD4 oriented model. It will be interesting to see how that turns out as it certainly sounds both promising and interesting to me. At the end of the event, each guest was provided a "gift bag," which contained a CoD Elite T-shirt, a hoodie, a sticker, and a belt buckle. All in all, I had a great time at the event. It was truly a great experience to be able to meet and talk with everyone and the event was very well put together.
E3 2011:
The next morning, Tuesday June 7th, I was able to attend E3, my pass being provided by Activision. E3 has been something that I had dreamed of attending ever since I started actively getting involved in the community and was extremely excited that I been given the chance to go. Although I was only able to spend one day there and I'm sure that I missed some stuff, I was able to cover most of what I wanted to see. And no, that did not include the Wii U! I visited the Plastic Piranha, Ubisoft, AMD, Activision, and EA booths extensively. The AMD booth in particular was very good to see. Although I am currently an Nvidia and Intel customer, it was nice to see PC gaming being represented over there. It was also great to see the Plastic Piranha booth. Those guys are working hard to bring PC gamers everything that they are used to getting and more. Considering the limited resources that they are operating under, I was blown away by what I was able to play of the game. It feels like a cross between Counter Strike and COD4, the perfect combination I think! Very impressed...
Although I very regrettably did not get to try out Battlefield 3 due to EA policy, I was able to get hands on time with Modern Warfare 3's Spec Ops Survival mode. This is a new 2 player co-op mode that has players fighting waves of enemies of ever increasing difficulty. It is fought on restricted multiplayer maps, similar to Wager Matches in Black Ops. The mode is sort of a hybrid between Zombies and the traditional Spec Ops mode from MW2. You end up fighting regular soldiers, Juggernauts, helicopters, and dogs. Upping the ante even more, some of the enemies even have C4 strapped to them. Nothing like having a dog coming at you that's rigged to blow! Additionally, You can purchase weapons and attachments, equipment, and killstreaks from three appropriately marked crates scattered around the map using points that you accumulate from shooting bad guys. One of the most welcome features, for me at least, in this mode is the ability to share points with your team mate, something I really wish was implemented in Zombies. All in all the mode was very fun and can see myself playing quite a lot of it if I end up buying the game, which I think I will, barring another P2P MP disaster.
Overall, I was very glad to have been given the chance to attend another CoD Event as well as E3. They both were amazing experiences that I'm sure I will not forget anytime soon. Hat is off to the guys at Activision for inviting me.
Please check out my collection of photos and videos from E3 and the CoD ELITE event posted below.
If you have any questions, comments, concerns, whatever, drop me a line in either the comments section below or via Twitter. I do this stuff, in part, for you guys so I would greatly appreciate hearing input, good or bad.
-H4WKE
Photos + Vid from the CoD ELITE Event
Photos + Vids from E3 2011
