Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is the 2022 entry in 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.5 games in this family →'s military-shooter franchise, developed by Infinity Ward and released on October 28, 2022. It was the debut title on 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.5 games in this family →, the rebuilt engine that later Call of Duty games carried forward, and it marked Call of Duty's return to Steam after several years of Battle.net exclusivity on PC. The same release introduced Warzone 2.0 and, inside it, the DMZ extraction mode, which has its own plate in this guide. The campaign, multiplayer, and the free-to-play Warzone 2.0 battle royale all run on the one client.

Running Modern Warfare II on PC means accepting a kernel-mode driver from Activision that loads with the game and unloads when you close it. Warzone 2.0 and DMZ shipped on this same client and the same anti-cheat, so they share its footprint exactly. Activision's most recent 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.5 games in this family → progress report is the best source for what changed in the current season's anti-cheat posture.

Every PC session of Modern Warfare II is protected by RICOCHET, Activision's in-house kernel-mode anti-cheat, which shipped with the game on day one. The RICOCHET kernel driver loads when the game launches and unloads when it closes, rather than running as an always-on background service. Alongside the kernel component, RICOCHET runs server-side detection and the in-game mitigations Activision documents in its public progress reports. The main Windows process is cod.exeProcesscod.exeCall of Duty HQ launcher (shared front-end)Open plate →, the unified launcher shared across modern Call of Duty titles; the broader picture lives under the ricochet anti-cheat family entry. RICOCHET's driver is not on the LOLDrivers public list, so it is not catalogued in the drivers section.

RICOCHET has been covered steadily by PC Gamer, BleepingComputer, and others since its 2021 introduction, including Activision's own disclosures about deterrent mitigations such as Cloaking (hiding legitimate players from a flagged account) and Damage Shield (neutralizing a flagged account's damage), which alter a flagged account's experience rather than banning it outright. Coverage has also documented false-positive ban waves on Modern Warfare II and Warzone, including an episode in which NVIDIA GeForce Now streaming users were incorrectly flagged. Activision publishes an appeals process; the outcomes of individual appeals are difficult to verify from the outside. Activision has been part of Microsoft since the acquisition closed in October 2023.