The Call of Duty franchise is one of the most popular franchises in the world and each annual iteration of the series reliably sells millions of copies. Additionally, the recent addition of the Call of Duty: Warzone battle royale has only further cemented Call of Duty as a titan within the industry. Yet even titans have their flaws, and Call of Duty's has been its struggles with widespread cheating in its games. In an effort to improve its efforts against cheating in its games, Call of Duty is introducing its all-new Ricochet anti-cheat initiative.
Ricochet is a new anti-cheat system that Call of Duty's developers are planning to introduce alongside the launch of Call of Duty: Vanguard, followed by support for Call of Duty: Warzone with the release of its Pacific map update. It's a multi-faceted anti-cheat system, meaning that it targets cheaters in multiple different ways. The list of anti-cheat features includes "server-side tools" that monitor analytics for cheating behavior, "enhanced investigation process," and "account security" updates.
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The heart of the Ricochet anti-cheat initiative is something new to Call of Duty games, however. It's called a kernel-level driver and it'll be a PC-exclusive feature, though it'll impact console players via cross-play. A kernel-level driver is built into a PC at its foundation, akin to drivers necessary for video cards and other key PC devices. In other words, it grants much deeper access to software running on a PC and enables a significantly more thorough amount of protection.
The kernel-level driver for Call of Duty will arrive in Call of Duty: Warzone first, later this year, and will then come to Call of Duty: Vanguard. The implication is that the different systems for the Ricochet anti-cheat initiative are still in active development and will be rolled out as they're ready.
Kernel-level drivers understandably cause some PC gamers to worry, given the breadth of access granted through them. For example, Activision theoretically could see everything a Call of Duty: Vanguard player does on their PC with an untrustworthy driver. In its announcement, however, the Call of Duty team promises the driver will solely operate while Call of Duty: Warzone or Call of Duty: Vanguard are on and will only monitor and report "software and applications that interact" with the game.
Call of Duty will not be the first to offer kernel-level drivers for anti-cheat. Dozens of games use third-party anti-cheat with kernel-level implementation. EasyAntiCheat, PunkBuster, and BattlEye are just a few examples of third-party services that provide kernel-level anti-cheat. Riot Games is perhaps the best comparison, as it implemented its own proprietary kernel-level driver in Valorant, much like Activision is doing for its Call of Duty games. No anti-cheat is perfect, but the Call of Duty team is clearly making an effort to improve.
Call of Duty: Warzone is available now and Call of Duty: Vanguard launches November 5 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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