Call of Duty: DMZ

DMZ was the extraction mode that launched inside Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 on November 16, 2022, alongside Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. Both were built by Infinity Ward, the ActivisionPublisherActivisionActivision is the publisher of the Call of Duty franchise. Since 2021 the Call of Duty competitive experience has been protected by RICOCHET, Activision's in-house kernel-mode anti-cheat.8 games in this family → studio that created the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and led the 2022 reboot, on the rebuilt IW Engine 9.0EngineIW Engine (Activision / Infinity Ward)The IW Engine is Activision's proprietary engine line for the Call of Duty franchise, originally derived from id Tech and substantially rewritten across iterations. Modern Call of Duty titles run on IW 9.0 and its successors.8 games in this family →; the wider Call of Duty studio group, Raven Software among them, supported the Warzone 2.0 launch. Squads of up to three deployed into Al Mazrah, the large map shared with Warzone 2.0 (with Ashika Island, Vondel, and the keycard-gated Building 21 instance added later), to run faction contracts for groups such as Legion, Black Mous, and White Lotus, pull loot and keys from locked caches, and reach an exfil chopper before the map's AI and rival squads caught them. Two things set it apart: the stakes and the diplomacy. Gear and insured-weapon slots carried between deployments, so what you brought in could be lost for good, and squads could assimilate strangers into a team of up to six mid-raid, turning a firefight into an uneasy truce. Those unscripted standoffs are what its players remember. Activision ran DMZ as a Beta for its entire life; it never moved to a 1.0 release.

DMZ is still reachable. On July 29, 2025, Activision moved Modern Warfare II out of the main Call of Duty install into a standalone title, and a separate Modern Warfare II DMZ Beta listing went live that day, priced at $0 on the Xbox store; Activision's support page calls it a free-to-play standalone download, though Steam lists it as content that requires the Modern Warfare II base game. It runs on the Modern Warfare II client with RICOCHETAnti-cheatActivision RICOCHETRICOCHET is Activision's in-house kernel-mode anti-cheat, deployed across the Call of Duty franchise since 2021. The kernel driver loads while a protected Call of Duty title is running. Since the Black Ops 7 beta in October 2025, Activision has also required TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot for Black Ops 7, for Warzone since December 4, 2025, and for Modern Warfare 4, checking the settings by attestation against Microsoft Azure servers; earlier titles are not named in that requirement, so this guide records the ask on each title rather than on RICOCHET as a whole.8 games in this family →'s kernel driver, which loads and unloads with the game, and it asks nothing of your firmware. Its successor, DMZ inside Modern Warfare 4, has its own plate, and that one does require TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot.

DMZ runs on the Modern Warfare II client, so it carries the same trust ask as the rest of that release. RICOCHET, Activision's kernel-mode anti-cheat, loads with the game and unloads when it closes. There was never a separate DMZ anti-cheat layer, and the broader picture lives under the ricochet anti-cheat family entry. DMZ does not ask for TPM 2.0 or Secure Boot: Activision's requirements list does not include Modern Warfare II. Because DMZ shares the base game's client, its trust posture and Modern Warfare II's are the same one.

DMZ's arc is unusually well documented because it ended in the open. On November 30, 2023, Activision said that from Modern Warfare III's Season 1, DMZ Beta would stay playable through Call of Duty HQ, with Al Mazrah, Ashika Island, the Koschei Complex, Building 21, and Vondel all still reachable, but that the mode would "not be available or interact directly within Modern Warfare III or Call of Duty: Warzone" and its progression would not sync. Across its run, players and reporters documented a cheating problem that the mode's stakes made especially cruel: because death meant losing your gear, cheating did not just take a match, it took the thing you carried in, and in early 2023 the cheat seller EngineOwning advertised a feature for crashing whole lobbies on the client DMZ ran on, as Dexerto reported. Vera's own account of what that cost the people who loved it is the blog post The Ghost of Al Mazrah, linked below.