This is your casual reminder — you can’t play Call of Duty: Warzone on PC from today if you don’t have these two things enabled

As a researcher, I’ve been following the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 closely. A major change for PC gamers with this release was an improved anti-cheat system called Ricochet. To actually play the game, however, players now need to have TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot enabled on their computers.

Today, December 4th at 9am Pacific Time, Season 01 launches, bringing updates to Call of Duty’s free-to-play battle royale game, Warzone.

With the release of Season 1, Warzone now works with Black Ops 7, but to play, your PC needs to have TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot turned on. These are now required features.

As a huge fan of both Black Ops 7 and Warzone, I’m really excited to hear about all the work the developers are doing to keep things fair! For Season 01, they’re adding even better ways to detect cheaters and protect legitimate players. That means they’re getting smarter at catching people who unfairly boost their progress. Plus, they’re expanding the security requirements – like TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot – to Warzone, which is awesome. And later in the season, they’re releasing a tool that’ll let us easily check if our PCs are up to snuff for security, which is a really helpful touch!

It’s great that Activision is creating a tool to help players check game compatibility. However, given that they announced it before the release of Black Ops 7, it feels like it should have been available already.

Generally, things are looking good. The recent Black Ops 7 beta saw very few cheaters, which is a great start. While preventing cheating is an ongoing challenge, the game has launched with a positive experience for most players.

As a researcher studying online gaming, I’ve found that free-to-play titles like Warzone unfortunately attract a lot of cheaters – people who seem to get a sense of accomplishment from falsely appearing skilled. I anticipate we’ll get a good initial assessment of how effective the new Ricochet anti-cheat system is pretty quickly once it’s implemented in Warzone, perhaps even faster than we would with a paid title like a future Black Ops game.

We’ve created a complete guide to help you check if your PC has TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot enabled, ensuring you’re prepared for the launch of Season 01.

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2025-12-04 15:41