Speaking to iGamesNews at Evo 2024, 2XKO technical lead Tony Cannon confirmed that Riot Game’s upcoming fighting game will feature the company’s own kernel-level anti-cheat software, Vanguard.
“A lot of the cheats we see in fighting games are things like reading input, reading game state, or injecting input,” Tony said. “They involve modifying the game binary in some way. Vanguard is really good at that, right? It’s a kernel-level anti-cheat, so it can detect and prevent a lot of these things from happening.”
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Vanguard was first introduced to Riot Games in 2020 with Valorant and has since been introduced to League of Legends in the hopes that its inclusion would help address the game’s ongoing cheating and bot issues. However, the software has proven controversial among some players, in part due to the fundamentally invasive nature of the kernel-level software.
For those who don’t know, basically, software running at the kernel level has the highest level of access to your system (i.e. your PC’s operating system). This can cause you all sorts of privacy issues. As we all know, technical issues can also arise. During the launch of Vanguard in League of Legends, users with older versions of Windows or specific configurations experienced issues. Some even reported that it prevented their computers from booting, although Riot itself said it couldn’t confirm any such cases. From this you should understand where most of the concerns come from.
When asked about his views on privacy issues, Tony reiterated Riot’s previous statements that they do not and will not collect player data. “Vanguard runs in the kernel, right? But we don’t collect player information, we don’t read the title bar of the application… We don’t collect it, we don’t send it. It’s very targeted to find cheats and prevent people from tampering with the 2XKO binary.
Tony continued: “A company might install kernel-level software to do these things, and we recognize that’s a problem. Valve has its own anti-cheat system, and cheats are getting so sophisticated now that they have to run in the kernel, right? So in order to protect every player experience, you have to work at the kernel level. So, you have to trust Riot to some extent, but we definitely don’t want to put players in harm’s way.”
Our full interview with Tony Cannon will be published later today, which dives into how 2XKO’s server-based rollbacks differ from traditional peer-to-peer rollbacks, whether the addition of Vanguard will force 2XKO to stay online, and his thoughts on Riot’s involvement in competitive fighting games. So if you’re interested in learning more, check back soon!
For those keen to play the game themselves, 2XKO will be running its first public alpha test of the game, and you can sign up now.
