Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 follows Battlefield 6’s lead, will also require secure boot on PC
I’m sure Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Battlefield 6 won’t be exactly the same game, despite their obvious bullet casing-littered common ground. However, they are opting to mirror each other in one manner – both will require you to enable secure booting on your PC.
As if summoned to do so by EA letting everyone know that this week’s BF6 open beta would necessitate a delve in your BIOS to click yes on a thing in the name of eliminating cheating, Activision have revealed Blops is doing the same thing.
With the arrival of Black Ops 6’s season five today, August 7, EA are initiating a “phased rollout” of secure booting and Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 as mandatory requirements when hopping into an entry of the series. The goal is to stop folks from loading any files not flagged as ‘safe’ when they fire up their PCs, such as ones they might use to do the likes of aimbotting or wallhacking.
The switch isn’t happening overnight, with this Black Ops 6 season still letting you jump in if you’ve not enabled one or both features, but you will be served notifications telling you to sort your setup out for the future in that case. Then, when Black Ops 7 prone-crawls its way out of the gulag later this year, it’ll be mandatory to have both enabled to play.
“These hardware-level protections are a key part of our anti-cheat efforts, and we’re asking all players to get compliant now,” Activision wrote. They also provided instructions as to how to check whether you’ve got secure boot and TPM 2.0 enabled via your BIOS settings, and turn them on if not.
If your game-playing box’s specs are fairly up-to-date, and especially if you’re running Windows 10 or 11, it shouldn’t be too much of a faff to sort. That’s provided you’re open to taking these extra steps with your own hardware as part of publishers’ efforts to try and combat cheating by, in Activision’s words, enacting measures to “strengthen security and protect the experience, without impacting performance.”
As of right now, the company don’t have any immediate plans to make secure booting and TMP 2.0 mandatory for Call of Duty: Warzone, but they indicate that could change in future. They also wrote that they’ll “share more details on additional protection measures we’ll be putting in place for Call of Duty as we get closer to the Black Ops 7 launch”, and that enabling two-factor authentication on your Activision account might become mandatory down the road.
If it helps, maybe imagine it’s Captain Price ordering you to do all of this admin just to shoot some folks dressed in swanky tactical getups. Also, if you’ve been sitting in a Battlefield 6 beta queue all morning, some server messing about by EA should hopefully help you get in soon.
