A beta version of the new game in the Call of Duty series is about to be released and anticipation is high in the community. Developers have announced more details about the game and beta over at www.callofduty.com.

You will be required to enter a CD key to join in on the Beta which will be available to all registered users of CallOfDuty.com, including for the newcomers who sign up after the PC Beta release. The exact release date of the beta has not been announced. The keys are not here to limit the number of users to participate in the Beta, but to allow you to create the unique profile name for their Friends and Invites features.

With the release of the Beta, you will be able to host servers and game service providers will be able to sell Beta servers and put them up as dedicated servers for the players to try the game out on. Basically it will be a limited multiplayer distribution of the game. One thing to note though is that running dedicated servers will be for Windows only. Also note that the accounts will be deleted after the Beta once the game releases.

One of the new features of COD5 is the Friends in Invite system that was mentioned before. You will have to authenticate to a master server that will keep track and maintain your unique user profile name which attaches to your cd-key. The reason behind this is that Activision wants to implement a Friends and Invite system (kind of like Steam) where you can add friends and invite them and view what servers they are playing on so you can join up and frag with them, hence why you need to auth with a unique profile name.

For players who like to clan hop a lot and will have various tag names in their Call of Duty: World at War gaming career, Activision also added a clan tag prefix which you can add in your profile for it to show up in-game while maintaining your unique profile name to take advantage of the friends system.


Source: www.callofduty.com