Call of Duty: DMZ (Modern Warfare 4)

DMZ returns as the extraction mode inside Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, built again by Infinity Ward, the studio that made the original DMZ in Warzone 2.0. Players call it DMZ 2, though 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 →'s name for it is simply DMZ. First detailed by Activision in June 2026, around the Xbox Games Showcase, it deploys players solo or in squads into Hajin, an exclusion zone set in a tri-point region bordering Russia and the Korean peninsula; Activision's October guide lists 13 major points of interest, from the Haneul Nuclear Reactor and the 14th Political Prison to Chang-san Air Base. Each deployment is one of three types, Story Missions, Dynamic Operations, or Free Roam, and threat levels escalate the enemy response the louder you play. Between runs, squads return to a persistent Forward Operating Base with a 3D Printer, a Stash, a Boss Board for hunting Lieutenants, and a Bounty Leaderboard, and each Active Duty Operator keeps its own Backpack, Loadout, and Trait Tree. Solo players always carry one tourniquet that brings them back wounded, and proximity chat now carries direction and distance. Early access opened October 20, 2026 for digital pre-orders.

DMZ comes with Modern Warfare 4 at $69.99, and Activision says the game will not be on Game Pass until Holiday 2027. On PC, confirm TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot with Activision's Secure Attestation Wizard before buying, because without them you cannot deploy. Players who used the same Activision account in the Modern Warfare II DMZ Beta get veteran rewards from Early Access. Worth watching in the first weeks: directional proximity chat, the Bounty Leaderboard, and the paid MIA recovery system, because those are the pieces that decide how strangers treat each other in Hajin.

DMZ is a mode inside Modern Warfare 4, not a separate install, so it carries exactly the base game's trust ask. On PC that means 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 Activision says launches with the game and shuts down when you exit, and Modern Warfare 4's firmware requirement: Activision states that TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are required to play, and that without them players are restricted from any online game mode. DMZ is played online, so the restriction covers it. Windows may show a User Account Control prompt for CODBrokerInstaller.exe or enrollaik.exe on first launch; Activision describes it as TPM 2.0 registration, and declining it blocks play. The mode's own Windows process name is not yet observed here.

The first DMZ is unusually well documented because it ended in the open: on November 30, 2023 Activision said it would stay playable but would not be part of Modern Warfare III or Warzone, and across its run players and reporters recorded a cheating problem that the mode's stakes made especially cruel, including a cheat seller's advertised server-crash feature in early 2023. Vera's own account of what that cost the people who loved it is the blog post The Ghost of Al Mazrah, linked below. Activision says the sequel was built from "player feedback from the original DMZ Beta." Whether RICOCHET and the new firmware requirement hold up where loss is real is a question only the live game can answer.