Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is now just weeks away, and like all multiplayer games, its developers are continuing to fight the good fight against potential cheaters and hackers who might attempt to ruin your matches. As one of the most popular series around, COD will naturally have a huge number of eyes on its match integrity, and to their credit its creators have come up with some of the most ingenious ways to detect and impede bad actors over the years. Infinity Ward and Activision have just detailed a new technology coming to MW4, and seeing it in action I’m honestly a little shocked this one hasn’t been tried before.
Call of Duty’s ‘Team Ricochet’ anti-cheat squad has been a hivemind of interesting ways to tackle troublemakers. Some of my favorites include the ‘Quicksand’ system that disrupted cheaters’ controls, and the phantom players called ‘Hallucinations’ that only hackers could see, causing them to fire at opponents who weren’t really there. For Modern Warfare 4, the hot new technology is ‘Server Culling,’ a term that’s quite common in game development but is being used for a very specific purpose here: impeding wallhacks.
“Few things ruin a great match faster than an opponent who can see you through a wall,” the developer remarks in a new video. “In Modern Warfare 4, we’re introducing a new way to fight back against wallhacks with Server Culling.” The developer explains how the multiplayer server sends and receives all the player locations in a match to everyone involved, “which meant that even when you couldn’t see a player behind a wall, your game client still received information on that player’s location.”
This information was what wallhacks would tap into and reveal opponents you don’t have direct line of sight on. This begs the question: what if that knowledge was simply taken away? Enter Server Culling. By building ‘occlusion layers’ into every map, typically placed inside any structures or objects that would impede your vision, the server can compare player positions and decide when two people shouldn’t have any way to see one another.
“Now, the server determines when you have no legitimate way of knowing where an opponent is, and their location data is entirely withheld from your game client.” It won’t be sent until they move back into your view. “Cheat software can’t reveal information it never receives.” It’s a simple but brilliant idea, and there’s clearly a lot of confidence in it, because otherwise the development team wouldn’t be so willing to reveal its hand to potential cheat makers before the game is even out.
Infinity Ward confirms, “Server Culling will cover every map available at launch for Modern Warfare 4. This includes DMZ and Combat Outpost, as well as new live-season maps for multiplayer, DMZ, and Warzone in Season 1 and beyond.” While it’s confident this will “disrupt the cheat marketplace,” the developer adds that it’s “not sitting on our hands, and will continue to strengthen our layer technology.”
It’s certainly another step in the right direction; the battle against unfair play will likely never truly stop, but I always appreciate seeing tangible efforts to improve the player experience. As for whether Activision will manage to convince players on other divisive elements such as the MW4 matchmaking debate, we’ll find out when it arrives on Friday October 23.