Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III / Warzone

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.5 games in this family →'s flagship military shooter franchise, developed by Sledgehammer Games. Multiplayer and the free-to-play Warzone battle royale share the same client and run 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 unified engine that Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer all ship on. The PC distribution surface is unusually wide: Battle.net, Steam, the Microsoft Store, and PC Game Pass. All PC sessions are protected by Activision's in-house anti-cheat, 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 →, which has shipped as part of the Call of Duty PC stack since late 2021.

Running Modern Warfare III or Warzone on PC means accepting a kernel-mode driver from Activision that loads with the game and unloads with it. Ban decisions can be made by automated systems, and the appeals process exists but is not transparent. Before launching, Activision's most recent RICOCHET progress report is the best source for what changed in the current season's anti-cheat posture.

RICOCHET is a kernel-mode anti-cheat developed internally at Activision. The kernel driver loads when a protected Call of Duty title launches and unloads when the game closes, 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. Coverage at the broader picture lives under the ricochet anti-cheat family entry. The driver is installed by the Call of Duty client and remains on disk until the game is uninstalled and residual files are cleared.

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, and recurring community reports of innocent accounts caught in subsequent waves on Modern Warfare II and Warzone. Activision publishes an appeals process; successful overturns are difficult to verify publicly.