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If you’re trying to play the Battlefield 6 Open Beta on PC, you might have run into a problem: ‘Secure Boot is not enabled.’
You are not alone. PC gamers hoping to play DICE’s latest now open beta early access is live have no choice but to enable Secure Boot on their PC. And a cursory glance at social media, subreddits and IGN’s own comments suggest some are having trouble with it.
To be clear, EA has published a user guide for how to enable Secure Boot on PC, and promoted that guide across social media. It’s a guide I myself had to use to boot the Battlefield 6 Open Beta. But it certainly requires a degree of confidence, as it involves tinkering with a part of a computer not all PC gamers will be instantly familiar with: the BIOS.
There are things like TPM 2.0 (which must be turned on) to deal with, and you need to make sure your Windows disk is GPT and not MBR (not everyone will know what these are). All this before you can even enable Secure Boot — and then you may not be able to enable it anyway, which then means you need to refer to your manufacturer for guidance (gulp!).
Yes, this won’t be a problem for more experienced PC gamers, but it will be an intimidating process for many others. And if you think this is something isolated to Battlefield 6, you’d be wrong. Just yesterday, Activision announced the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will require the exact same thing: Secure Boot enabled.
So, what’s all this in aid of? Strengthening game security using built-in Windows PC features. It’s no secret that cheating in competitive multiplayer games is a huge problem for publishers. Activision has spent millions trying to reverse the narrative for Call of Duty. EA will be mindful of Battlefield 6 getting overrun at launch. It seems TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are the new reality for PC gamers.
Here’s Activision’s explanation, from a blog post published yesterday:
TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module) is an industry-standard, hardware-based security feature built onto CPUs or motherboards that verifies the PC’s boot process has not been tampered with. Secure Boot makes sure a PC can only load trusted software when Windows starts.
When Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 releases later this year, TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot will be required to play on PC. “These hardware-level protections are a key part of our anti-cheat efforts, and we’re asking all players to get compliant now,” Activision warned.
Back to Battlefield 6, and the open beta Secure Boot process has certainly caused some people to panic, and others to find themselves with additional problems they didn’t have before. Early indications suggest there’s huge interest in the Battlefield 6 open beta, so it will be interesting to see how this one develops over the course of the weekend.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
