EA anticheat arrives for Battlefield V in April, will break it on Linux / Steam Deck

Thanks EA.

Spoiler, click me

Eternal Assholes

EA AntiPlay, more like.

Won't affect me personally (I don't play shooters), but it's still sad for the people who liked the game. Maybe one day the developers of shooters will figure out how to design cheat-resilience into the game itself, instead of trying to take control over their customers systems, which won't ever work.

Won't affect me personally

And what if EA forces this crap into every title they ever published or developed? Will you be affected then? We already saw Capcom try this song and dance number, randomly breaking things because reasons.

Regardless of who is personally affected, moves like these are disasters for Linux gaming as well as the entire gaming industry. DRM is cancer, retroactively forcing it on older titles is despicable and anti-consumer to a degree most companies can't even bring themselves to think about. And then we have the "Triple A" monsters...

Maybe one day the developers of shooters will figure out how to design cheat-resilience into the game itself, instead of trying to take control over their customers systems, which won't ever work.

I think they need to stop focusing on client-side and develop a decent server-side solution.

Will the singleplayer campaign still be accessible?

DRM is cancer, retroactively forcing it on older titles is despicable and anti-consumer to a degree most companies can't even bring themselves to think about.

Bit of hyperbole there. Most companies can bring themselves to think about pretty much anything that will make them money.

Spoiler, click me

One of the major points of the corporate form of organization is to push otherwise decent people into more-or-less-willingly performing arbitrarily despicable acts in the name of profit for the company. Not that this is totally unique; one of the major points of organizing a religion as a hierarchy is to push otherwise decent people into performing despicable acts at whatever level is required to save more souls, AKA grow the organization's power. And so on; hierarchies are there to grow the hierarchy's power and scale, and one major component of that is disciplining the human cogs in the hierarchy into performing whatever actions are necessary to pursue that end.

Weird question maybe, but does this also affect the single player story mode?

Fuhhhhkin EA

Lucky for me I don't have those games, but it's still an ass move to do from them. Now I wonder, would I be entitled to a refund if they made the game unplayable in my system even though the time for the refund might have passed? After all, it's not an issue on my end if I can't play a game I bought anymore.

God, I hate AAA companies and what they became...

Won't affect me personally (I don't play shooters), but it's still sad for the people who liked the game. Maybe one day the developers of shooters will figure out how to design cheat-resilience into the game itself, instead of trying to take control over their customers systems, which won't ever work.

Unfortunately I don't think it will ever happen. Because most of the games from big studios are developed backward driven by corporate rules (spreadsheets basically with best ROI as possible) not technical ones.

Recycling old engines, POCs, changing everything after each iterations and once everybody is happy the kinks are ironed out as much as possible driving devs crazy.

I would love to see a game being tamper proof but it would involve well written specs and mechanics, reviewed by specialized developers to build it. And then making the program itself hard to decompile and analyze at runtime. It would cost a lot of money for a project that could easily be a flop.

Maybe one day the developers of shooters will figure out how to design cheat-resilience into the game itself, instead of trying to take control over their customers systems, which won't ever work.

I think they need to stop focusing on client-side and develop a decent server-side solution.

Now that's something "AI" (aka neural networks) could be useful for, rather than spitting out humongous piles of somewhat believable texts or images.

And then making the program itself hard to decompile and analyze at runtime.

The other way 'round. Making the server side secure enough, that even if the whole game were open sourced cheating would be a non-issue.

Why not figure out how to support this on the steam deck

Won't affect me personally

And what if EA forces this crap into every title they ever published or developed? Will you be affected then? We already saw Capcom try this song and dance number, randomly breaking things because reasons.

Regardless of who is personally affected, moves like these are disasters for Linux gaming as well as the entire gaming industry. DRM is cancer, retroactively forcing it on older titles is despicable and anti-consumer to a degree most companies can't even bring themselves to think about. And then we have the "Triple A" monsters...

It would still not affect me personally. The Sims 4 was the last EA title I ever bought (and that's not exactly a new game), and I highly doubt I will ever buy another one. These guys just don't make any good games anymore...

That doesn't mean I don't agree with everything you said. ;)

Btw, it's a disaster even for Windows users. They'd be better off without a piece of malware running in the background that can get hacked and mess with their system because it has access to all of it. These things are not only morally questionable, but a security nightmare waiting to happen.

And then making the program itself hard to decompile and analyze at runtime.

The other way 'round. Making the server side secure enough, that even if the whole game were open sourced cheating would be a non-issue.

I agree that security by obfuscation does not work but in a game it depends what we describe as secure enough.

Most of the time the server send a lot of data to the client then wait for the feedback so the cheating happen on the client side that send back a perfect hit (if we talk about FPS) then the server update the other clients.

So what should be secure? If the client data is changed directly in memory, the data itself would be ok but not the result.

We could avoid to send other players' position to the client until they are really visible (could be a huge load on the server and need a fast synchronous connection, the client cannot interpolate anything).

We could cypher and randomize the memory allocation on the client.

Or we can use AI server side to check super human behavior but sometime a lucky reflex can hit in the same area than a bot (but not in the long run indeed).

I think a lot of different tools/methods could be used together but computer resources consumption should also be kept low to be effective. The subject is vast.

I guess theres only one thing we can do now......

Will the singleplayer campaign still be accessible?

i guess you can play singleplayer since game dont require anti-cheat in singleplayer campaing so far. Or you bypass it with transgaming (wine proton etc.) and play singleplayer mode.

Looking through my Steam collection, I see that from EA I only have the Dragon Age & Overlord games and Alice: Madness Returns. By the looks of things, it'll stay that way too!

Last BF game I actually played was Battlefield Bad Company 2. Tried Battlefield 3 and it was the last one purchased and tried, did not care for the new direction. Dropped EA when they started requiring their own launcher. Also preferred the larger player maps that Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare original, made it harder and more fun.

EA and Blizzard are both dying studios that are held up by their legacy and IP contracts like Star Wars, NBA, NFL,and FIFA. Marcus Lehto said it best about EA. Look forward to quality designers jumping to new studios to produce better games.


Last edited by yndoendo on 28 March 2024 at 12:15 am UTC