Battlefield 6 has been officially revealed. EA spelled a lot of the beans as part of the worldwide multiplayer gameplay reveal event, which also featured hours of live gameplay from hundreds of content creators.
All of that is to say: most of the important details have been confirmed. That also includes certain specifics that have to do with the PC version of the game, and you can be certain not everyone is going to enjoy this news.
Battlefield Studios has confirmed that Battlefield 6 will launch with Javelin Anticheat on PC, EA’s own kernel-level anticheat programme, which runs in the background to detect and prevent cheats. Javelin Anticheat was given its name in April this year, but the tech has been around since 2022 in some form.
EA has already implemented Javelin in several of its games, including EA FC, Madden, the F1 games, and more besides. The tech – then known as EA Anticheat – first arrived in a Battlefield game with Battlefield 2042’s Season 6, so it only makes sense that the next major entry in the series would launch with it.
Javelin Anticheat will also be present in the upcoming beta, so it’s going to be a good opportunity to test out the tech on a wide range of PC configurations. The beta will also require enabling Secure Boot in Windows. Secure Boot is a Windows security feature that itself relies on TPM 2.0, a hardware security feature that the vast majority of modern PCs support.
The existence of kernel-level anticheat in a major release is neither rare nor is it surprising. Even outside of EA’s own games, many modern releases with core multiplayer elements rely on one brand of kernel-level anticheat or another. Vendors like BattlEye, and Easy Anti-Cheat are some of the most well known.
Battlefield’s major competitor, Call of Duty, has its own solution called Ricochet.
The idea of allowing third-party software – anticheat services, in this case – access to such a low level of your PC’s operating system has always been controversial. The arguments against it are plentiful; it prevents most games that use it from working on Linux/SteamOS, for instance.
It has, however, proven to be one of the most effective against combating many of the tricks modern cheats rely on. It’s obviously not perfect, but it’s become accepted as something you’ll have to enable if you want to play modern AAA multiplayer games.
Battlefield 6 arrives October 10 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.