Battlefield 6 Dev Apologizes For Requiring Secure Boot To Power Anti-Cheat Tools

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this month, EA announced that players in its Battlefield 6 open beta on PC would have to enable Secure Boot in their Windows OS and BIOS settings. That decision proved controversial among players who weren't able to get the finicky low-level security setting working on their machines and others who were unwilling to allow EA's anti-cheat tools to once again have kernel-level access to their systems. Now, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl is defending that requirement as something of a necessary evil to combat cheaters, even as he apologizes to any potential players that it has kept away.

'The fact is I wish we didn't have to do things like Secure Boot,' Buhl said in an interview with Eurogamer. '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.' Throughout the interview, Buhl admits that even requiring Secure Boot won't completely eradicate cheating in Battlefield 6 long term. Even so, he offered that the Javelin anti-cheat tools enabled by Secure Boot's low-level system access were 'some of the strongest tools in our toolbox to stop cheating. 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.'

Despite all these justifications for the Secure Boot requirement on EA's part, it hasn't been hard to find people complaining about what they see as an onerous barrier to playing an online shooter. A quick Reddit search turns up dozens of posts complaining about the difficulty of getting Secure Boot on certain PC configurations or expressing discomfort about installing what they consider a 'malware rootkit' on their machine. 'I want to play this beta but A) I'm worried about bricking my PC. B) I'm worried about giving EA complete access to my machine,' one representative Redditor wrote.

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