Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is 'building toward the most advanced and robust anti-cheat', requiring players to enable Secure Boot for the beta

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's beta is just days away, scheduled to kick off on October 2 for early access players (October 5 for everyone else) ahead of the game's official release on November 14. But before you get to jump in and check it out, Activision wants to make sure that you've got all your ducks in a row, and by ducks, I mean Secure Boot.

"On PC, the Black Ops 7 Beta will require TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot," an official blog post reads. "We’re building toward the most advanced and robust anti-cheat protections players will find in gaming, starting with the Beta on October 2 for Early Access and October 5 for all players."

If you played any of the open Battlefield 6 betas, then you'll know just how much of a pain Secure Boot can be. It's a UEFI firmware that prevents any unauthorised software from running while your PC is starting up, ensuring only verified and uncompromised software can load. It's also what publishers like EA and Activision use for their own anti-cheat, in this case, Ricochet.

"We’re striking cheat makers and sellers from every angle: in-game detections that stop them cold, and legal action that dismantles their operations," the blog post says. "And we’re not stopping there. Significant continued improvements to our systems are coming, including those that detect external hardware.

"The launch of Black Ops 7 marks the beginning of a new phase for Ricochet Anti-Cheat. We enter it armed with stronger systems and an unwavering commitment to game protection and cheat prevention."

It may not sound like a big deal, but it is a real pain for players who either don't or can't have it enabled, or for those who simply dislike the idea of highly intrusive kernel-mode anticheats that have access to pretty much everything with very little restriction. And it can occasionally lead to unexpected headaches, as we saw in August when the Javelin anti-cheat in the Battlefield beta butted heads with Riot's Valorant anti-cheat—not a problem most of us are likely to encounter, but also something that shouldn't be ignored.

Unfortunately, if you're using an older PC which doesn't support UEFI or Secure Boot, you're kind of screwed, as there's not a whole lot you can do to get games that require these two features to run. It's all so frustrating that even Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl admitted that "I wish we didn't have to turn on Secure Boot." But this is just the reality that we live in now, with Secure Boot likely becoming more commonplace for games like Battlefield and Call of Duty going forward.