Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's PC Beta opens around 4am to 5am AEST on August 22, and getting in now requires clearing a hardware check that has nothing to do with skill. RICOCHET Anti-Cheat requires TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot enabled on any PC joining the Beta, a stricter bar than past Call of Duty betas have set. Activision even published a separate tutorial just for turning those two settings on, which says something about how many players are expected to hit this wall before their first match.

TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are the same baseline Windows 11 already leans on for its own security requirements, so most PCs built in the past few years should already qualify. Anyone on an older rig, or running Windows 10 without those settings toggled, will need to dig into BIOS or UEFI first. It's part of a broader industry shift toward locking cheats out at the hardware level instead of patching them out after the fact.

A Campaign mission, inside a multiplayer Beta

The bigger news is what clearing that wall gets you. For the first time in the franchise's history, a single-player Campaign mission called Entrenched will be playable during both Beta weekends, alongside the usual multiplayer modes. Campaign content has always stayed locked until launch. Turning a mission into Beta content, not just a pre-order perk, is a real shift in how Activision is marketing this entry, and it follows a run of Modern Warfare 4 previews, including the Losing Ground vignette and the Aston Martin tie-in, that have leaned hard on the campaign to carry the marketing rather than multiplayer alone.

Modern Warfare 4 still launches worldwide October 23, with pre-order customers getting full campaign access a week early on October 16, as Activision confirmed back in July. What's new here is narrower and more interesting: players who never pre-order will get a real, playable taste of a campaign mission during the Beta itself, weeks before anyone outside a pre-order gets that access.

Exact Beta windows and platform availability beyond the PC early access slot haven't been detailed yet.