Ricocheting Private Ryan.

Image credit: Activision, Eurogamer.

As we approach the first weekend of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 beta, Activision's Ricochet anti-cheat team has published a detailed guide to help PC players turn on certain security features that are necessary to play online.

If you played any multiplayer game on PC in the last five years - shooters especially - you'll no doubt be familiar with the TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot requirements on Windows. Those have existed in Call of Duty for a couple of years now, but it appears the restrictions are being tightened for Modern Warfare 4 compared to Black Ops 7 and the current version of Warzone.

More specifically, players who did not meet the requirements were previously "restricted from accessing certain game modes (including Ranked Play) and playlists". Activision also warned that those players "may be placed in separate matchmaking pools with other players who do not meet these requirements."

With the Modern Warfare 4 beta, the requirements have become more strict, now reading: "players who do not meet requirements will be restricted from playing any online game mode".

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The guide itself is incredibly helpful and welcome, given how necessary those features are to play Modern Warfare 4. But the developer went a step further, releasing an entire video that goes through the process - complete with UEFI/BIOS walkthroughs for AMD and Intel systems.

The tutorial is incredibly helpful, particularly when it gets into what the different platforms call TPM. Even more useful is the Call of Duty Secure Attestation Wizard, an app you can download on PC to test whether it meets those security requirements. The app was updated earlier this month in time for Modern Warfare 4.

Secure Boot is a low-level system feature that allows anti-cheat software deeper access to your Windows install. By loading during the PC's startup phase, anti-cheat is able to prevent cheats from running on startup. TPM 2.0 builds on Secure Boot to provide an extra, hardware-based layer of protection by detecting when the PC's boot process has been tampered with.

In recent years, the two have become increasingly required in a number of competitive games on PC, including Battlefield 6, Valorant and several other major titles. In Battlefield 6's case the Secure Boot requirement is already enforced, and Battlefield Studios is looking to do the same for TPM 2.0 soon.

Prior to the launch of Battlefield 6, Eurogamer spoke to technical director Christian Buhl about why these low-level systems are necessary in the never-ending battle against cheaters. Though Buhl was happy with how successful the tech was at preventing cheats, he wasn't thrilled with how many the requirements prevent from playing the game.

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