The latest move in Epic Games's ongoing fight against cheaters in Fortnite sees the gaming giant implement hardware-level security in Easy Anti-Cheat implementation, at least for those players looking to participate in tournaments. As of February 18, 2026, tournament players will need to enable TPM,...
Cheaters are getting more and more numerous all the time; they have to take steps to not be completely overrun.
My wife got eliminated by a 100% invisible player a week or so ago. No in-game item or event makes you completely invisible like that. The stealth splash item and the hide-and-seek event are both imperfect camoflage. So clearly this player was hacking. If she encountered players like that in every game, she’d quit, understandably.
See, this always annoys me. Game info, yes, is hard: The game needs to send info about the guy behind the wall to your client, so it can draw shadows, play their subtle footsteps, etc. But game logic, like “isPlayerInvisible”, should NOT be hackable like that. That means the hacker’s client sent game state var “Hey, I am invisible now” to the server, and the server just said “Sure, okay . Hey, player 87, you are now being shot by an invisible player.”
Imagine if you sent all state variables while banking. “I send $5 to my savings account, which leaves my checking with $8 trillion.”
It generally comes down to developer laziness; transmit all info, trust everything, and rely 100% on the anticheat, so the game code can stay flexible and run in all locations.
cheaters already have bypasses for hardware-level anticheat. in practice this just serves to restrict us.
There’s nothing that hardware-level anti-cheat can do against the monitor having a feature that highlights other people in a game, for example. The computer wouldn’t be able to tell.
The only thing that this might stop is someone using something like Cheat Engine to give themselves infinite health or something like that, but I would be a little surprised if that was the common means of cheating these days, compared to something just looking at the screen and putting a helpful overlay on top.
WTF
“Character highlighting”, “flashbang recovery”, they just had to come up with some corporate sounding names for common cheats lmao. We’re just back to LAN parties as far as I’m concerned, sucks for the competitive scene though.
Funny asterisk below the examples too
Nividia did this years ago at the driver level. Literally had wall hacks built right into the drivers. Never made it to release cause of the back lash.