Warhammer: Vermintide 2 gets an Easy Anti-Cheat upgrade - finally works properly on Linux

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 from developer Fatshark just got an upgrade for Easy Anti-Cheat, and this finally makes online play work properly on Linux. The developers have moved from the old-style EAC to the newer version supplied by Epic Online Services.

Before this update if you were playing on Linux with Proton, you would have to host the game to play with friends, otherwise it would crash quite quickly. Now that appears to no longer be a problem, although the developers aren't directly supporting it.

There's still one problem though! The default stable version of the game fails to launch on Linux due to the launcher, so you have to opt into the "Bypass Launcher" Beta on Steam.

After that, you'll then get launch options when you go to play the game. Select Bypass Launcher.

The game will then load up correctly. I've personally tested it working perfectly online joining others with Proton 9.0-4.

From their Steam post:

We’ve just pushed a patch that swaps our old version of Easy Anti-Cheat for the newest version. The previous version is scheduled to shut down on March 4, which would’ve meant no protection to the game from cheats or tampering unless we did this upgrade.

A couple of things to note about this change:

• For normal gameplay, there should be no notable difference. The game will continue to run normally in both Official and Modded realms, and no extra actions need to be taken from you as players to continue playing.
• Operating Systems that had incompatibility issues with our EAC may find those issues gone with this update. We still can only officially support Windows 10 & 11, but nonetheless there might be one barrier less in that aspect.
• The system necessary to support Sanctioned Mods is changing. This means that until sanctioned mods are updated by their authors, they might not work in the official realm.
  • We are currently in communication with mod authors to find the swiftest solution to this issue for all sanctioned mods.
• Connecting to other lobbies might take longer than usual at first. Will go back to normal after some time.
• Versus Quickplay will be temporarily disabled as we update the servers.

We're working to fix the issues with Sanctioned Mods and Versus Quickplay Dedicated Servers as soon as possible, we'll keep you updated.

Hotfix 6.3.4 patch notes - 3rd of March

Features & Tweaks

• Replaced the Kamu Easy Anti-Cheat for Epic Online Service
• Improved error messaging for banned players to show reason & duration.
• Temporarily disabled Versus Quickplay / Dedicated Servers.

Really nice to see.

I've updated our dedicated anti-cheat compatibility page to note the change in the status. Along with this I've added support for us to add a comment to each game on the page, like in this case where it needs the Beta as noted above.