Fans of first-person shooter games will be in for a treat this year, as both Call of Duty and Battlefield will be launching their respective blockbuster titles – Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Battlefield 6 – later this year. While both franchises are long-time rivals in the industry, they both agree on one matter: players will be required to have Secure Boot enabled to play the games.
Call of Duty and Battlefield’s “Bipartisan Agreement”
The truth is, modern multiplayer games all suffer from the same problem: cheaters. As cheating tools get better, it became harder for game developers to combat the problem without some form of system validation. As such, both franchises have developed their own anti-cheat systems, with Activision referring theirs as Ricochet, while EA’s latest solution is dubbed Javelin, with Secure Boot now a requirement for both.
In the case of Ricochet, the new Secure Boot requirement (along with TPM 2.0) will be mandated in the upcoming Season 5 update for CoD’s latest title Black Ops 6, and on the other side, Battlefield 6 has just been announced by EA to require Secure Boot. The reason behind this requirement is to ensure systems cannot be tampered in a way beyond what existing anti-cheat tools can detect. Both developers has noted that this requirement are complementary to their current tools to minimize cheating potential.
This requirement does mean that Linux gamers, particularly owners of Steam Deck, are out of luck. While gaming on Linux is fairly feasible thanks to tools like Proton, anti-cheat software are generally not designed to work in these systems, especially if they are the kernel-level kind like Ricochet, Javelin, or Riot Games’ Vanguard – the latter of which is the first to introduce such requirement for Valorant, and more recently, League of Legends.
Pokdepinion: Some people, including myself, do not fully trust kernel level anti-cheat systems for reasons like CrowdStrike, but I can’t blame these developers either, given how rampant cheating has become.
