Battlefield 6 open beta won't run if you have Valorant installed, thanks to Riot's anti-cheat — uninstall if you plan to joint the second open beta this weekend

EA is organizing another free open beta for Battlefield 6 this weekend — Aug. 14 to Aug. 17 — with a new "Empire State" map that promises even more close-quarters combat. You'll also be able to play the new Rush and Squad deathmatch modes, and, of course, pick up some free rewards.

That all sounds great, but there's a small thorn in the game's side, called Valorant. Yes, that Valorant. If you want to play Battlefield 6, you cannot have the eSports first-person shooter installed — if you do, Battlefield 6 won't even start.

Over the past weekend during the first open beta, user AnAveragePlayer posted on the r/Battlefield subreddit, showing a rather strange error message: It was Battlefield 6 citing a "security violation," telling the user to uninstall Valorant because it was incompatible with the game. The post got almost 10,000 upvotes and appears to be the first major instance of two anti-cheat programs colliding.

Battlefield 6 just told me to uninstall Valorant. Literally. from r/Battlefield

The issue is Riot's anti-cheat software — Riot Vanguard. Vanguard is a kernel-level anti-cheat, which means it runs with the same privileges as does the Windows operating system — going beyond even your admin account. At this level, anti-cheat software can catch potential exploits before they take effect, because it can see and intercept far more than you can from user space.

However, unlike other anti-cheats, Vanguard doesn’t start running when you launch a Riot game — it loads as a boot driver, starting up before almost anything else on your PC. Riot’s justification for this is that, if a cheat loads first, it can hook into the kernel and hide itself so completely that anti-cheat software can't see it. Vanguard can only remove this window of opportunity by running at boot, and so it does.

Modern hacks work by reading (or sometimes writing) a game’s memory — turning raw values, such as a random string of digits, into actionable information, such as revealing an enemy’s position behind a certain wall. Kernel-level anti-cheats counter this by monitoring memory access at the same privilege level — killing the exploit before it can feed the player any unfair advantage.

i was right (again). - YouTube

Watch On

Where Vanguard goes further is in how it hides and protects sensitive game data. It creates "guarded regions" inside the game’s memory — pages mapped in such a way that only threads Vanguard has explicitly approved can access them. Everyone else, including debuggers and cheats, gets a page fault — as if the memory doesn’t exist. To enforce this, Vanguard hooks into the operating system, checking every time the CPU switches threads, to decide who gets to see the guarded pages.

This level of control is why Vanguard has a reputation for being one of the most invasive anti-cheat programs on the market. It basically impersonates Windows by inserting itself into the OS’s low-level dispatch paths and memory management in a way few other commercial drivers do. And this is where it's collides with other games: kernel-level anti-cheats can’t easily share control.

If you run EA’s Battlefield 6, which has its own anti-cheat software, while Vanguard is active, the two will compete for the same low-level hooks, causing one to block the other entirely. It’s not EA playing the saint, it’s a turf war in the kernel — which results in an anti-cheat landscape so territorial that certain games simply can’t run side-by-side. So, if you’re planning to jump into Battlefield 6 this weekend, uninstall Valorant first.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.