The creator of the now-defunct Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 mod, H2M, has opened up about what happened when Activision slapped the mod with a cease and desist, admitting, "the past couple of days have not gone to plan".

Although the mod - which upgraded Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer mode - was announced over a year ago, the cease and desist arrived the day before the mod was scheduled to be released last week, forcing the project to "shut down [...] immediately and permanently".

Shortly thereafter, unhappy Modern Warfare 2 fans jumped onto the Steam page to express their dismay.

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered mod, H2M, has been cancelled following a cease and desist demand from Activision.

Although the mod - which upgraded Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer mode - was announced over a year ago, the cease and desist arrived yesterday, a day before the mod was scheduled to be released later today.

"Today, our team members received a Cease & Desist order on behalf of Activision Publishing in relation to the H2M-Mod project," the team explained on Twitter/X.

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Last week, the Xitter account for H2M - a mod aiming to recreate the heyday of classic Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer inside Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered - announced that they had received a cease and desist from Activision Blizzard, and would shut down the project. The 2022 version of Modern Warfare 2 lacked the original’s multiplayer, and H2M was so highly-anticipated that Steam sales of the 2016 FPS balooned in the lead-up to the mod’s planned release date. It didn't hurt that Activision had it on sale, of course, but the timing lined up so well that some fans speculated the discount was a deliberate bait-and-switch on the publisher’s part to profit from excitement over a mod they were already planning to shut down.

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Last week, the Xitter account for H2M - a mod aiming to recreate the heyday of classic Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer inside Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered - announced that they had received a cease and desist from Activision Blizzard, and would shut down the project. The 2022 version of Modern Warfare 2 lacked the original’s multiplayer, and H2M was so highly-anticipated that Steam sales of the 2016 FPS balooned in the lead-up to the mod’s planned release date. It didn't hurt that Activision had it on sale, of course, but the timing lined up so well that some fans speculated the discount was a deliberate bait-and-switch on the publisher’s part to profit from excitement over a mod they were already planning to shut down.

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Activision has banned over 65,000 players across Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

The bans rolled out in the last few hours, purging thousands of "cheating and boosting" players from both Ranked and non-Ranked play alike.

"The Ricochet Anti-Cheat team has now purged the Ranked Play leaderboards in both Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare 3, banning accounts for cheating and boosting," Team Ricochet – the cheating enforcement team – said.

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Hardened battle royalists will remember Caldera, the sandy island map of bunkers and palm trees in Call Of Duty: Warzone. It got shut down last year as Activision focused their efforts elsewhere, making the map unplayable. But you can now revisit those bullet-strewn beaches. In theory, anyway. Activision have released it as a 4GB open-source project that can be explored in a 3D model-viewing tool. That's cool. But among their reasons for doing so, there lies a predictably grubby logic: they want people to use the data to train AI.

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Hardened battle royalists will remember Caldera, the sandy island map of bunkers and palm trees in Call Of Duty: Warzone. It got shut down last year as Activision focused their efforts elsewhere, making the map unplayable. But you can now revisit those bullet-strewn beaches. In theory, anyway. Activision have released it as a 4GB open-source project that can be explored in a 3D model-viewing tool. That's cool. But among their reasons for doing so, there lies a predictably grubby logic: they want people to use the data to train AI.

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Look, who knows when we’ll see Fallout 5 - there’s an increasingly less-than-zero chance we’ll all be living in a real post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland by the time Bethesda get around to revealing anything, if their deliberately slow approach to The Elder Scrolls 6 (it’s been nearly THIRTEEN years since Skyrim) is much to go by. Still, even without a full sequel, Fallout is all around us - in multiple seasons of a television show, in Fortnite, and now in Call of Duty.

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Look, who knows when we’ll see Fallout 5 - there’s an increasingly less-than-zero chance we’ll all be living in a real post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland by the time Bethesda get around to revealing anything, if their deliberately slow approach to The Elder Scrolls 6 (it’s been nearly THIRTEEN years since Skyrim) is much to go by. Still, even without a full sequel, Fallout is all around us - in multiple seasons of a television show, in Fortnite, and now in Call of Duty.

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A federal court has awarded Activision £11.3m ($14.4m) after it ruled in favour of the publisher's lawsuit against cheat makers EngineOwning and Garnatz Enterprise Ltd, and 11 individual people.

As spotted by VentureBeat, the lawsuit, which was filed at the beginning of 2022, accuses the companies and individuals – Valentin Rick, Leonard Bugla, Leon Frisch, Marc-Alexander Richts, Alexander Kleeman, Leon Schlender, Bennet Huch, Ricky Szameitat, Remo Loffler, Charlie Wiest and Pascal Classen – of profiting from cheats and giving an unfair competitive advantage to players prepared to pay for auto-aim and auto-fire software cheats.

At the time, Activision said it sought "to put a stop to unlawful conduct by an organisation that is distributing and selling for profit numerous malicious software products designed to enable members of the public to gain unfair competitive advantages", and described EngineOwning as a "German business entity... engaged in the development, sale, distribution, marketing, and exploitation of a portfolio of malicious cheats and hacks for popular online multiplayer games, most prominently the COD Games".

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The classic anime series Gundam examines the traumatic experience of war, particularly the unalterable effect it has on those young soldiers forced to participate in the horrors of fighting for their life while taking the lives of others using weapons of inhuman strength and devastation. Which clearly makes it the perfect fit for a bit of upcoming DLC for military-fetishising interactive gun range Call of Duty.

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You remember the ending of 2011's first-person bullethoser Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, right? Everyone does! A big man kills another big man with a gun but then - then! - a third big man kills that first big man with a rope. It's dramatic stuff. Well, a data-diving enthusiast of the CoDwars has discovered a cut ending from the original trilogy's closing chapter. It's a more downbeat and mysterious finale, featuring a shadowy figure whose identity is never revealed. Also, Captain Price, the hero of the franchise and aforementioned big man number three, drops his cigar with possibly mortal implications.

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Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile, the iOS and Android version of Activision Blizzard's battle royale hit, is officially getting its worldwide launch on 21st March following a limited release in select counties over the course of the last year.

Warzone Mobile, which is being developed by Activision's Digital Legends, Beenox, Shanghai, and Solid State studios, initially launched in Australia back in November 2022. Following its roll-out across a number of other countries, Activision announced it would be getting its full release in autumn last year - but plans changed in October, when the publisher confirmed it had made the decision to postpone its launch to "spring" 2024 in order to "polish up" the experience.

With Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile's worldwide release now locked down to 21st March, Activision has started talking specifics, confirming the game will launch with two maps: Verdansk - which supports 120-player battle royale matches - and Rebirth Island, which supports 48-player battle royale matches using Gulag-free Resurgence rules.

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