Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, the 2016 redo of Call of Duty 4, made a surprise climb up the top-sellers chart of Steam earlier this week. Being on sale helped, but the real reason was the looming release of the H2M mod, a massive, free fan-made project that aimed to recreate classic Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer in the newer remaster. But the whole thing has been shot down at the last minute: One day before the mod was set to go live, the developers say Activision's lawyers came knocking.
"Today, our team members received a Cease & Desist order on behalf of Activision Publishing in relation to the H2M-Mod project," the team said on Twitter. "We are complying with this order and shutting down all operations immediately and permanently."
There's been no further communication from the makers of H2M, but the website at h2m-mod.dev has also been taken offline.
Needless to say, an awful lot of Call of Duty fans are not happy with this outcome. For one thing, there's a real desire for Modern Warfare 2 (2009) multiplayer amongst the fans: As staff writer and Modern Warguy Morgan Park said when he wrote about the H2M mod earlier this week, "Modern Warfare 2 is still considered peak CoD for many teens of the late aughts." Despite that, the official remastered Modern Warfare 2 released by Activision in 2020 does not include any multiplayer: It's a campaign-only endeavor.
And not only did H2M include remasters of all the Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer maps, it also featured campaign levels reworked for multiplayer combat, and every Call of Duty 4 map as well—54 maps in total. That's a big deal, and it makes the C&D a big loss.
But what's also chapping a lot of asses is the fact that Activision waited until the last possible minute before dropping the C&D on the project—and, more to the point, until the end of the Steam sale. As we noted, an awful lot of people rushed out to buy Modern Warfare Remastered for half-price solely to play the H2M mod, and there's a sense among some fans that Activision intentionally let things slide to take advantage of the big sales bump. That's led a lot of H2M followers on Twitter, some with large followings themselves, to urge everyone to be sure to refund the game while they can.
"A lot of the original Infinity Ward team consisted of devs who used to be modders," former Call of Duty creative strategist Robert Bowling said on Twitter in response to the mod shutdown. "The original Call of Duty PC games released mod tools and server files to empower community creations to expand on the original vision. Build systems to help your UGC community not strangle it."
Others had a more succinct take on the whole thing.
As sad as it is,it's not an entirely surprising outcome. This isn't the first time Activision has dropped a cease-and-desist order on a Call of Duty mod project: In the span of just one week in 2023, it shut down the SM² Call of Duty client mod project that had been in the works for two years, and the older IW4X mod made by X Labs.
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