Call of Duty: Elite is “not ready to reveal everything”

Despite an initially negative response, Activision says it made the “right choice” with the way it chose to announce Call of Duty: Elite, the upcoming free community platform for the series with additional paid-for features.

“I’m not sure that there was any way we could have messaged it any better and not gotten that response from that portion of the audience,” said Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg in an interview with Gamasutra.

Hirshberg says Elite still has few more interesting, unannounced features that Activision has chosen to keep quiet. “We were not ready to reveal the entire feature set of the service because a lot of it is embedded into Modern Warfare 3…”

VideoGamer.com ferreted out some of the specific ways Elite would integrate into Modern Warfare 3 at this year’s E3.

Does Activision think the announcement baffled some members of the Call of Duty community? “What we revealed was incomplete and we did create some confusion,” said Hirshberg. “We’re not ready to reveal everything yet. We’re going to have a better service at launch because we’re going to be able to polish it and refine it through the beta. I think we made the right choice.”

Activision must be doing something right: two million people have signed up to take part in the Call of Duty: Elite beta, which launches for Black Ops on July 14.

Hirshberg also addressed rival publisher EA’s verbal jousting, who insist that Battlefield 3 will be a “flat out superior game” to Modern Warfare 3. They’re obviously trying to draw a response,” he said. “That would be great for them. They’ve talked about our game in the press more than we have. That’s obviously strategic. That’s obviously a decision they’ve made. But I don’t want to swing at a pitch in the dirt.”

“I’m being genuine when I say we want to focus on our games.”

Battlefield 3 gameplay was finally shown on PS3 last week, and has disappointed some fans because it was running at 30fps and in 720p, though developer DICE retorted by saying that the PS3 version of Battlefield 3 is running at a higher resolution than Modern Warfare 2 ever did.