Riot's fighting game 2XKO will use Vanguard anti-cheat

Speaking to VG247 at Evo 2024, 2XKO tech lead Tony Cannon has confirmed that Riot Game's upcoming fighting game will feature Vanguard, the company's own kernel-level anti-cheat software.

Tony stated the following, "A lot of the cheats we see in fighting games are either about reading inputs, reading game state, or injecting inputs. 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 those things happening."

Vanguard was first implemented into Riot games with Valorant back in 2020, back has since been implemented into League of Legends with hopes that its addition would help tackle the game's ongoing cheating and botting problems. However, such software has proven controversial among a portion of the players, due in part to the fundamental intrusiveness of kernel-level software.

For those who don't know, in basic terms software running at the kernel-level has the highest level of access to your system, which means your PC's operating system. This potentially opens you up to various privacy issues. Technical issues have been known to occur too. During the rollout of Vanguard in League of Legends, users with older versions of Windows or specific configurations ran into problems. Some even reported that it stopped their computer from booting, though Riot itself stated it could not confirm any such cases. From this you should see where much of the concern stems from.

When asked for his thoughts on privacy concerns Tony echoed prior Riot statements by saying outright that they are not, and will not, collect player data. "Vanguard's running in the kernel, right? But we're not collecting player information, reading the title bars of apps... We're not collecting it, and we're not sending it. It's very targeted and finding cheats and preventing people from tampering with the 2XKO binary.

Tony continues, "There's potential for a company that's installing kernel-level software to do that stuff, we recognize that's a problem. Valve has its anti-cheat, and cheats are getting so sophisticated these days that they're having to run in the kernel as well right? So to protect everyone's player experience, you have to work at the kernel level. So it's like, you have to trust Riot at some point, but we are absolutely not interested in compromising players."

Our full interview with Tony Cannon, which delves into the differences of 2XKO's server-based rollback vs traditional peer-to-peer rollback, whether Vanguard's inclusion will force 2XKO to stay online, and his thoughts on Riot's involvement in the competitive fighting game scene is live here! Read it for the longer conversation.

For those keen to play the game themselves, 2XKO will be having its first public alpha playtest which you can sign up for right now.