BIOS shock: getting past Battlefield 6’s anti-cheat error was the faffiest thing a PC game has ever required of me

I’m used to PC gaming being fiddly but I’ve never experienced anything like trying to get the Battlefield 6 beta working before.

Allow me to paint you a picture. I installed Battlefield 6 at the weekend, to join the open beta, but when I tried to load the game I was returned with a security error, reading, “Secure Boot is not enabled.” So I closed the pop-up and visited the EA help page suggested, where things got rapidly more complicated.

“Some EA games require Secure Boot,” it said, “a Windows 10 and 11 security feature that ensures your PC only loads safe software during startup.” But enabling Secure Boot isn’t a particularly straightforward procedure, requiring adjusting settings in your system’s pre-boot BIOS menu (basic input/output settings) that adjusts how your PC hardware functions.

The seriousness of this is why the EA help page warns: “If you’re not used to navigating to and updating your BIOS settings, you should contact a professional or your manufacturer’s customer support.” And: “Incorrectly configuring your BIOS settings can cause issues with your computer, including a failure to start up.” And: “EA doesn’t take responsibility for changes to your BIOS settings.”

But no problem, right? If you’ve ever built a PC, you’ll be well aware what BIOS settings are, and you may well have encountered them even with a storebought machine. I built mine, so feeling relatively confident, I followed EA’s instructions (which you’ll need to open on a second screen while you reboot your machine), found the settings I needed for my specific motherboard and enabled Secure Boot.

I felt rather pleased with myself until my computer wouldn’t load. Changes reverted, then, I logged back into Windows to research what was going on. And note: here’s where EA’s help ended. The company provided links to different motherboard manufacturer’s websites, but I was on my own finding the information I needed there. Fortunately for me, someone else on Reddit had exactly the same problem, and fortunately for them, and for me, someone else linked a video solution.

This is what I was dealing with: one of my disk partitions was the wrong type for the required UEFI firmware interface to read. What I needed to do was convert it from MBR to GPT. Got that? No, neither did I – I had never encountered any of this before. Nonetheless, the YouTube video was very helpful and after half-an-hour of tinkering, and a few false starts later, I finally conquered the pre-game Battlefield 6 boss of enabling Secure Boot.

Delighted, I was then hit with another error to download a specific GeForce driver before I could begin. Hashtag PC gaming.

But on a more serious note: I can’t recall ever doing anything anywhere near as faffy to get a PC game to run – and to do things that affect my whole computer rather than just the game itself. This all took me a couple of hours in total – hours I would rather have spent playing the actual game – and while I readily accept I am no PC expert, I am confident and experienced enough to give things a go. I can imagine a fair number of people seeing the EA help page warnings and not risking BIOS changes at all.

So why are we being asked to do this? Simple: cheating. We are allowing EA’s anti-cheat software Javelin deep access to our machines to be able to detect suspected cheating activity there. “As part of our ongoing commitment to Positive Play in Battlefield, Secure Boot is a requirement to play Battlefield 6 on PC,” EA’s Javelin page reads. And by the way we checked with EA and yes, Secure Boot will continue to be a requirement when Battlefield 6 launches on 10th October.

“Requiring Secure Boot provides us with features that we can leverage against cheats that attempt to infiltrate during the Windows boot process. It also lets the Battlefield Positive Play team use its own features and related dependent security features like TPM [Trusted Platform Module] to combat other forms of cheating, the most relevant of which include:

Kernel-Level Cheats and Rootkits
Memory Manipulation and Injection
Spoofing and Hardware ID Manipulation
Virtual Machines and Emulation
Tampering with Anti-Cheat Systems

“Any attempt to access Battlefield 6 without Secure Boot enabled will result in a prompt indicating its necessity.”

In other words, EA’s Javelin requires deep enough access that it can recognise kernel issues on your PC, kernels being core components of operating systems, and deep enough access that it can recognise issues with your hardware. And regardless of how you feel about it, if you want to play Battlefield 6 on PC, you have no option but to agree.

The biggest thing to note, however, is EA is not the only company doing this. Riot Games’ Vanguard anti-cheat software, used in Valorant and League of Legends, does the same thing. This is why you can’t run both Valorant and Battlefield 6 at the same time, because the anti-cheat programs clash. Activision Blizzard’s Ricochet anti-cheat system also requires Secure Boot and other deep PC access features for similar reasons. Even Microsoft’s ubiquitous PC operating system requires Secure Boot in order for Windows 11 to be installed. In other words, it’s normalised. A new standard has been created.

Incidentally, the flip side of this is once you’ve gone through the rigamarole of enabling Secure Boot and other associated features, you needn’t enable them again. You should now be set to play these other games without incident.

But there’s a wider issue here that surrounds the never-ending cat-and-mouse chase between cheaters and the people who make and police those games, and the lengths both sides are apparently prepared to go to in order to get the upper hand. Where does it go from here?

Then again, cheating is rubbish, and perhaps these latest developments will finally turn the tide of battle against it. EA has already said that more than 330,000 cheat attempts were blocked during the Battlefield 6 beta weekend, which seems significant. But at what cost? And will it really stop the cheaters? And, of course, they only issued that statement about how many cheat attempts they blocked because – surprise! – the Battlefield 6 beta still had some cheaters anyway.

Ultimately, in this case it all adds up to two hours of my life that I’ll never get back, I can tell you that much. Still, at least I can now install Windows 11.