Friday, December 2nd 2016
Watch Dogs 2 Wants to Monitor Your System, But You Need Not Let It Do So
We've earlier reported about the implementation of EasyAntiCheat on Watch Dogs 2 - and how the Ubisoft game installs a driver in kernel mode and a service that monitors your systems' operating files (when Watch Dogs 2 is running). In that piece, we said that "This mechanism is also running even when you're in single-player-only - and even offline - modes, meaning that you're not getting out of its crosshairs no matter how you are playing the game". Now, there seems to be a way to bypass the system monitoring altogether and enjoy the game in single-player. The way to do so, however, varies whether you're running the game on Steam or on Uplay.
If you're a Steam user, right-click the Watch Dogs 2 game on your library, hit "Properties", "Launch options", and input "-eac_launcher" like in the below picture.
If you're using Ubisoft's Uplay system, you select Watch Dogs 2, "Properties", "Game launch arguments", and input the same "-eac_launcher" in the pop-up command window, as shown below:
Once you've done so in your game platform of choice, start the game. If you did everything correctly, a splash screen should appear, warning you that "EasyAntiCheat is not installed and multiplayer will be disabled", prompting you to reinstall it in order to resume online activities (though all you really have to do is remove the command-line parameter and you're back on multi-player):
Now you can rest easy, playing the game the way it's meant to be played: with you as the proverbial watchdog, without having to worry of prying eyes or unwanted potential privacy violations and undesired anti-cheat measures. At least now you have the choice whether to use or not to use the game's intrusive anti-cheat mechanism, even if you do have to make do without multi-player modes. But there's always a bright-side, and in this case, there are two of them: not only have you stopped the evil corporation from spying on you (taking a leaf from the game itself), but now you also have popular overlay applications such as MSI's Afterburner or streaming apps like OBS working again. Knock yourselves out.
32 Comments on Watch Dogs 2 Wants to Monitor Your System, But You Need Not Let It Do So
Just say No to this game.
I done with Ubisoft.
Although the DLC does make that rather hard these days, making the price nto worth it
The last iteration of it they made was incomplete hell (they were given 6 months to work on it, no more), and filled with over the top DRM. And they concluded based on it's poor sales that the genre was dead, not that it was their fault in the least... just that the market didn't want that anymore. :shadedshu:
So they were once capable of making good games, but they've completely lost that ability once they went "big"
No more getting money from me too.
There's tons of great games to play even if you pass on all Ubisoft or EA
craptitles. Not to mention you'd be supporting the right kind of developers.These cheats are becoming more like malware. They nestle themself outside the OS, simply unable to be detected by any regular anticheat / anti-virus and all.
There are many cheat writers who code these stuff up for a living. Some of them made serious money with many cheats, wallhacks and all that stuff.
Back in the days, i used to work on anticheat for a certain game as well. We where able to view anyone's processes in XP or any other OS. But the moment they started to hook on a game outside the game itself, it was pretty much done, and nothing much we could do back then since the game itself was very limited. It was just a demo version of some game with just one map. There was a decent community for it every day tho.
Mostly a anticheat looks for is:
- File checksum (modded files)
- Memory checksum (modded memory parts of the game)
- Make screenshots and uploads it at random intervals
- Some more relevant stuff, such as proces viewing, which programs you are running with proberly a checksum as well
It can be updated as simular to a antivirus, that checks for certain *known* files. If anticheat is smart, it simply brings in map who cheats currently, and start some huge banning within a period of time.