Battlefield 2042 Adopting New Anti-Cheat System in Season 6

Battlefield 2042's next season starts in October, and when it arrives, cheaters and others skirting the rules will find themselves up against a new suite of anti-cheat tools. Electronic Arts announced this week in an update on the next stage of anti-cheat in Battlefield 2042 that the game will adopt EA anti-cheat, a kernel-level system developed by Electronic Arts itself. The transition isn't optional and will happen for all PC players in October, Electronic Arts said, with some specifics provided this week alongside the announcement regarding why this change is being made.

For reference, Battlefield 2042 is currently using Easy Anti-Cheat, a popular anti-cheat solution used by all sorts of games ranging from Apex Legends to Elden Ring, but that'll change in October.

EA Anti-Cheat

As mentioned previously, EA anti-cheat is developed by EA itself, and that's part of the reason why the Battlefield 2042 developers want to use it. Using third-party solutions like Easy Anti-Cheat is a route many games take, but EA said outside tools like that are often "opaque" to in-house devs.

"EA anticheat is a kernel-mode anti-cheat and anti-tamper solution developed in-house at Electronic Arts," EA said. "PC cheat developers have increasingly moved into the kernel, so we need to have kernel-mode protections to ensure fair play and tackle PC cheat developers on an even playing field."

EA continued to say that adding this new anti-cheat program wouldn't negatively impact gameplay in any way and that the tool will be as "performant and lightweight as possible." The kernel-level nature of the anti-cheat program is something that people sometimes take issue with such as when Riot Games announced it'd be using a kernel-level system for Valorant, but Easy Anti-Cheat is already kernel-level itself, so this new one will be no different in that regard.

"This varies on a game-by-game basis. For games that are highly competitive and contain many online modes such as Battlefield 2042, kernel-mode protection is absolutely vital. When cheat programs operate in kernel space, they can make their cheat functionally invisible to anti-cheat solutions that live in user-mode." EA said. "Unfortunately, the last few years have seen a large increase in cheats and cheat techniques operating in kernel-mode, so the only reliable way to detect and block these is to continue to have our anti-cheat operate there as well. In addition to EA anticheat protecting our PC players from cheaters, our console players who match with PC opponents through Battlefield 2042's cross-play features will also be protected from cheaters operating on PC platforms."

Battlefield 2042's new anti-cheat system will be implemented with the start of Season 6 in October, though the new season doesn't yet have a confirmed release date.