With Battlefield 6’s open beta done and dusted and its October 10 release date in sight, developer DICE is prepping the shooter for launch across PC and console. But it surely is on PC specifically that EA’s anti-cheat efforts have raised eyebrows, and even caused some fans to miss out.
PC gamers who played the Battlefield 6 open beta may need run into the next on-screen warning: ‘Secure Boot just isn’t enabled.’ Indeed, if you should play Battlefield 6 on PC you may have no alternative but to enable Secure Boot. And based on the open beta, some had trouble with it.
Enabling Secure Boot involves tinkering with a component of a pc not all PC gamers will likely be immediately accustomed to: the BIOS (try IGN’s guide for more). There are things like TPM 2.0 (which have to be turned on) to take care of, and it’s essential be sure that your Windows disk is GPT and not MBR (not everyone will know what these are). All this before you’ll be able to even enable Secure Boot — after which chances are you’ll not give you the chance to enable it anyway, which then means it’s essential refer to your manufacturer for guidance.
While this won’t be an issue for more experienced PC gamers, it can be an intimidating process for some. And in response to DICE, it knows these anti-cheat measures will prevent some people from playing Battlefield 6 in any respect.
Chatting with Eurogamer, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl lamented the situation. “The actual fact is I wish we didn’t need to do things like Secure Boot,” Buhl said.
“It does prevent some players from playing the sport. Some people’s PCs cannot handle it and they can not play; that basically sucks. I wish everyone could play the sport with low friction and never need to do these varieties of things.”
Still, Buhl sounds pleased with the effectiveness of the likes of Secure Boot, that are “among the strongest tools in our toolbox to stop cheating.”
“We were pretty blissful with how the anti-cheat performed. Obviously I’ll say we are able to never be perfect, anti-cheat is all the time a cat-and-mouse game where we’re continuously going backwards and forwards and keeping on top of what the cheaters are doing. But from the start this was something we put a high priority on, so once we launch this game now we have a very strong anti-cheat program in place.”
Buhl continued: “Again, nothing makes cheating not possible, but enabling Secure Boot and having kernel-level access makes it a lot harder to cheat and a lot easier for us to seek out and stop cheating.”
It’s no secret that cheating in competitive multiplayer games is a large problem for publishers. Activision, for instance, has spent hundreds of thousands attempting to reverse the narrative for Call of Duty, and TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are in place for Black Ops 7 on PC.
While Secure Boot caused some people problems, the Battlefield 6 open beta enjoyed huge player numbers on Steam, so it can be interesting to see how this goes at launch.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You possibly can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.