Some hardcore fanatics might say that Call of Duty's a major part of their life. Thinking about killstreaks, prestiges and perks in Activision's multi-developer FPS series takes up a large part of their days and their nights get spent filling online opponents full of bullet holes.
It's these players who've flocked to Call of Duty Elite , the social network which launched alongside last fall's best-selling Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Elite's a bit like FPS fantasy football, since it lets players form clans with other individuals and track their own performance in MW3 in a plethora of ways. But, until now, you've had to be in front of a PC or a console to take advantage of that.
This week sees the debut of Call of Duty Elite on iOS, opening up the stats and leaderboards to to COD-heads who own Apple's iDevices via a free app. Starting tomorrow, you'll be able to see your profile, review you latest activity and look at kill/death ratios on your iPad, just as you can on other platforms. However, according to Chacko Sonny—the head of the Beachhead studio that's been building Elite—the most significant feature on Elite mobile comes in the form of Custom Class changes.
MW3 players will be able to change their loadouts from an iPhone and then have the changes dynamically implemented when they fire up the game on their system of choice. "Let's say we're at lunch, talking about the games that we played last night, reviewing your recent matches, and seeing what happened to your K/D" says Sonny, laying out a probable usage scenario. "We look at the top of the scoreboard and see what those guys were using. OK, that might be a combination that you might want to try. Right from the mobile app, you can configure to those same weapons and try them out the next time you play."
Sonny knows that there might be some skepticism with moving Elite onto new platforms, since it experienced an extremely rocky launch in its first month. But that's all in the past, he says. "So we're at a spot where the service is 100 percent operational. Features are in place. We know that there are things that people are still waiting on. Most notably, clan operations being one of them. And we're absolutely heads down working to ensure that clan operations experience that people get is the best that it possibly can be."
An Android launch for Elite mobile will follow some time this year but, when asked about Elite integration on PlayStation Vita, all Sonny had to say was that Activision had nothing to reveal with regards to Call of Duty on Sony's upcoming handheld.