Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III is the 2023 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.8 games in this family →'s flagship military shooter franchise, developed by Sledgehammer Games 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.8 games in this family →, the engine lineage the modern Call of Duty studios share. At launch its multiplayer and the free-to-play Warzone battle royale shared one client; Warzone has since moved on, to Black Ops 6 in November 2024 and to Black Ops 7 in December 2025, and it has its own plate in this guide. On July 29, 2025 Activision moved Modern Warfare III out of the shared Call of Duty install and made it a standalone title. The PC distribution surface is unusually wide: Battle.net, Steam, the Microsoft Store, and PC Game Pass.

Running Modern Warfare III on PC means accepting a kernel-mode driver from Activision that loads with the game and unloads with it, and nothing more at the firmware level: it does not require TPM 2.0 or Secure Boot. It installs on its own now, outside the shared Call of Duty HQ app. If what you are after is Warzone, that runs on the Black Ops 7 client and carries its firmware requirement; see the Warzone plate before you assume this game's footprint applies.

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 → is a kernel-mode anti-cheat developed internally at Activision. Activision says the driver launches with the game and shuts down when you exit, rather than running as an always-on background service. Alongside the kernel component, RICOCHET runs server-side detection, machine-learning models, and in-game mitigations such as Cloaking (hiding legitimate players from a flagged account) and Damage Shield (neutralizing a flagged account's damage output) that Activision documents in its public progress reports; the broader picture lives under the ricochet anti-cheat family entry. Modern Warfare III does not ask for TPM 2.0 or Secure Boot: Activision's requirements list names Black Ops 7, Warzone, and Modern Warfare 4, not this game. The game process is cod23-cod.exeProcesscod23-cod.exeCall of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023) game processOpen plate →; before July 29, 2025 the Call of Duty HQ launcher, cod.exeProcesscod.exeCall of Duty HQ launcher (shared front-end)Open plate →, started it.

RICOCHET has been the subject of sustained public reporting since launch. PC Gamer, BleepingComputer, and Vice covered the original 2021 rollout, the December 2021 global deployment, and Activision's own disclosures about Cloaking and Damage Shield as deterrent mitigations applied to flagged accounts rather than only outright bans. Coverage has also documented false-positive ban waves, including an episode in which NVIDIA GeForce Now streaming users were incorrectly flagged. On October 17, 2024, Activision said it had disabled a workaround in Modern Warfare III and Warzone that "impacted a small number of legitimate player accounts" and that it had restored them; a hacker later told TechCrunch the number was in the thousands, and Activision did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment. Activision publishes an appeals process; successful overturns are difficult to verify publicly.