COED was at the Call of Duty Championship in Los Angeles this weekend, with 32 four-player teams from around the world showing up to see who is best at Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Here’s what we learned:
1. There’s a new March Madness, and it’s got nothing to do with basketball.
This year’s third annual Call of Duty Championship took great strides to prove that e-sports are every bit as viable as athletics. Across the street from the NCAA Tournament regional finals at the Staples Center, the three-day tournament packed a total of nearly 10,000 fans into a tent atop a parking structure building. Fans begged competitors for photos and autographs, and groupies showed up to try to meet their crushes. With $1 million in prize money along the line, this is serious business.
2. Pros don’t play like you.
With its jetpacks and higher speed, Advanced Warfare favors aggression and punishes camping and hiding. Matches were crowd-pleasing throwdowns, with long-distance headshots, acrobatic melees and impressively coordinated teamwork drawing roars from the crowd. Sledgehammer Games producer Mike Mejia said that is no accident. “That’s actually by design,” he said at the tournament. “We were always tweaking and looking for ways to ramp the action up and make games flow quicker and get players out there being aggressive.”
3. It’s an American game.
Although tournament organizers go to great lengths to include competitors from Europe, Asia and
Australia, all the true contenders hail from the U.S. The live crowd at the tournament was savvy to the phenomenon, packing the main stage bleachers when American teams threw down and leaving it empty when foreign teams competed. Hardly any teams from abroad made it past the group stage.
4. Denver Broncos wide receiver Demaryius Thomas can take you out in deathmatches.
Thomas rocked the Celebrity Pro-Am, leading his team to a dominating victory over Detroit Lions wideout Golden Tate’s squad, quipping that they had to settle for server. The ownage was for a good cause. Thomas won a $100,000 donation to the Call of Duty Endowment — which hooks up out-of-work veterans with jobs — for his efforts.
5. The new Advanced Warfare DLC will be amazing.
Ascendance, the $15 DLC pack that drops Tuesday on Xbox Live, includes four new maps, which Thomas and Tate slugged it out on during the Pro-Am competition. Settings range from an alien spacecraft crash atop Mount Rushmore to a waterbound urban Australia with the Sydney Opera House in the background. There’s also the second episode of the Exo Zombies saga, in which John Malkovich, Rose McGowan and Bill Paxton voice soldiers who contend with undead hordes who have gotten ahold of futuristic military technology wielded by soldiers in the game.