What Is AlterWare and Which Call of Duty Games Does It Support?

Updated

AlterWare is a set of community-made enhanced clients for five older Call of Duty titles: Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, Ghosts, Advanced Warfare, and Black Ops 3. It restores features the original developers removed, patches exploits present in the Steam versions, adds weapons and maps ported from other games, and supports modding and dedicated servers. If you own one of these games and want a more complete, more secure, and more moddable version of it, AlterWare is aimed at you. If you don't own the base game, note that the site describes these as clients for those titles rather than standalone games.

Supported games and client names

Game Client Notes
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 IW4-SP Single Player mod
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 IW5-Mod Single Player mod
Call of Duty: Ghosts IW6-Mod —
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare S1-Mod —
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 T7X Standalone client

The client names (IW4, IW5, IW6, S1, T7) follow the internal engine codenames for each title, which is why you'll see them used interchangeably with the game names across the site and community.

What AlterWare actually changes

The site lists six core differences from the original releases:

  • Restored features — content and functionality removed by the original developers is brought back.
  • Additional content — weapons and maps ported from other Call of Duty games.
  • Security patches — exploits that exist in the Steam versions are fixed.
  • Modding support — tooling that lets the community create and share new content.
  • Dedicated servers — host your own or join community-hosted ones, with a full server browser for discovery.
  • Community driven — development and support happen through the project's Discord and forum.

The practical upshot: you get a version of the game closer to its original scope, with fewer known exploits and a live multiplayer/server ecosystem, instead of the state the Steam release was left in.

How to get started

There are two download paths, and which one you use depends on the game:

For MW2, MW3, Ghosts, and Advanced Warfare — use the AlterWare Launcher. The launcher automatically downloads and updates the IW4-SP, IW5-Mod, IW6-Mod, and S1-Mod clients, so you don't manage versions manually.

For Black Ops 3 — download the T7x client separately. It's a standalone client: place it in your BO3 game directory and run it.

If you need step-by-step help, the site points to a detailed installation guide on the official forum. The expected result after either path is a working enhanced client for that title, kept current (launcher path) or run directly from your game folder (T7x path).

Community and support

Support, content sharing, events, and news run through the project's Discord server, which the site states has over 16,500 members. There's also a support forum and a GitHub presence linked from the site. If you hit an installation problem or want to find active servers, those are the places to look.

A note on affiliation

AlterWare states plainly that it is not endorsed by or affiliated with the copyright holders of the base games, and that the trademarks used belong to their respective owners. Keep that in mind: these are unofficial community clients, not official releases.