Previously this month, EA revealed that gamers in its Battleground 6 open beta on PC would need to make it possible for Secure Boot in their Windows OS and BIOS settings. That choice showed questionable amongst gamers who weren’t able to get the picky low-level security setting dealing with their devices and others who hesitated to permit EA’s anti-cheat tools to when again have kernel-level access to their systems.

Now, Battleground 6 technical director Christian Buhl is safeguarding that requirement as something of a required evil to fight cheaters, even as he asks forgiveness to any possible gamers that it has actually kept away.

“The fact is I wish we didn’t have to do things like Secure Boot,” Buhl stated 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 confesses that even needing Secure Boot will not totally remove unfaithful in Battleground 6 long term. Nevertheless, he used that the Javelin anti-cheat tools allowed by Secure Boot’s low-level system gain access to 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.”

Excessive security, or not enough?

When revealing the Secure Boot requirement in a Steam online forum post prior to the open beta, EA described that having Secure Boot allowed “provides us with features that we can leverage against cheats that attempt to infiltrate during the Windows boot process.” Having access to the Trusted Platform Module on the motherboard by means of Secure Boot supplies the anti-cheat group with exposure into things like kernel-level cheats and rootkits, memory control, injection spoofing, hardware ID adjustment, making use of virtual devices, and tries to damage anti-cheat systems, the business composed.