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 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 might have run into the following on-screen warning: ‘Secure Boot is not enabled.’ Indeed, if you want to play Battlefield 6 on PC you have no choice but to enable Secure Boot. And based on the open beta, some had trouble with it.
Enabling Secure Boot involves tinkering with a part of a computer not all PC gamers will be instantly familiar with: the BIOS (check out IGN’s guide for more). There are things like TPM 2.0 (which must be turned on) to deal with, and you need to make sure your Windows disk is GPT and not MBR (not everyone will know what these are). All this before you can even enable Secure Boot — and then you may not be able to enable it anyway, which then means you need to refer to your manufacturer for guidance.
While this won’t be a problem for more experienced PC gamers, it will be an intimidating process for some. And according to DICE, it knows these anti-cheat measures will prevent some people from playing Battlefield 6 at all.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl lamented the situation. “The fact is I wish we didn’t have to do things like Secure Boot,” Buhl said.
“It does prevent some players from playing the game. Some people’s PCs can’t handle it and they can’t play; that really sucks. I wish everyone could play the game with low friction and not have to do these sorts of things.”
Still, Buhl sounds pleased with the effectiveness of the likes of Secure Boot, which are “some of the strongest tools in our toolbox to stop cheating.”
“We were pretty happy with how the anti-cheat performed. Obviously I’ll say we can never be perfect, anti-cheat is always a cat-and-mouse game where we’re constantly going back and forth and keeping on top of what the cheaters are doing. But from the beginning this was something we put a high priority on, so when we launch this game we have a really strong anti-cheat program in place.”
Buhl continued: “Again, nothing makes cheating impossible, but enabling Secure Boot and having kernel-level access makes it so much harder to cheat and so much easier for us to find and stop cheating.”
It’s no secret that cheating in competitive multiplayer games is a huge problem for publishers. Activision, for example, has spent millions trying 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 will be interesting to see how this goes at launch.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
