Battlefield 6’s open beta makes enabling secure boot on your PC mandatory, because cheaters

If you’re planning to hop into Battlefield 6’s open beta later this week, you might have to do some digging around in your PC’s settings in order to get in. EA have elected to make enabling secure boot on your hardware mandatory, as part of an effort to limit cheating.

It’s not that surprising a move, given the publishers opted to make it a hard requirement for Battlefield 2042 earlier this year. EA’s not alone either, with the likes of Riot having already done the same with fellow online shooter Valorant. You see, the real war isn’t about nations, resources, or petty rulers’ personal grievances – it’s to ensure you don’t get sniped by a Terminator with permanent x-ray vision or auto-aim.

“To play on PC, you must have Secure Boot turned on,” the EA Help account announced on the socials last night, “It’s a system setting that’s on by default on most PCs and keeps gameplay fair.” Basically, it’s being used as an extra measure alongside EA’s Javelin anticheat software, stopping your machine from loading up any software not flagged as ‘safe’ when you start it up.

The company has at least provided both written and video instructions to follow if you need to delve into your BIOS settings and either check whether you’ve got secure boot enabled already, or turn it on.

As with a lot of anti-cheat related debates, the question is whether the potential elimination of some hacking or other exploitation you might run into in a game that’s aiming for fair fights is worth the extra palavaer and publisher-exerted control over what you do with your hardware.

For folks running Windows 10 and 11, it hopefully shouldn’t be too much of a practical inconvenience if you follow the instructions, but other setups might be in for a more complicated time.

If you’ve yet to double-check which modes, maps and changes from previous Battlefield Labs testing you’ll be in for if you do jump into the open beta when it opens its doors from August 7th (early access) or August 9th (general), EA’s also shared all of that info this week.