UPDATE: Fancy playing Apex Legends? You might want to wait a bit, to make sure you won't randomly be given the ability to see through walls

UPDATE (19/03/24, 10:00 AM GMT): Epic Games has now tweeted: "We have investigated recent reports of a potential RCE issue in Apex Legends, which we have confirmed to be unrelated to Easy Anti-Cheat. We are confident THERE IS NO RCE vulnerability within EAC being exploited." This follows the company behind Easy Anti-Cheat stating: "We have investigated recent reports of a potential RCE issue within Easy Anti-Cheat. At this time - we are confident that there is no RCE vulnerability within EAC being exploited. We will continue to work closely with our partners for any follow up support needed."

Ok, you might be good at Apex Legends, but odds are you’re not good enough to be able to gaze through solid surfaces. That said, following some incidents of hackers giving pro players some competitive advantages they didn’t ask for, players are currently concerned that they might be at risk of having something similar happen to them.

Yup, the North American finals of the Apex Legends Global Series - a competition that sees people who’re very good at shooting each other, well, shoot each other - have recently had to be postponed midway through because people were getting unexpected help. It looks like an exploit being used on the game’s anti-cheat measures could be to blame, but it’s probably best to take a break until that’s officially confirmed or denied.

What happened to kick all of this off? Well, Apex pro Noyan Ozkose, who goes by the handle Genburten, suddenly found himself able to see every other player in his session, despite there being, you know, walls in between them and him. It looks like he was basically forced to hop straight out of the match once he realised what was going on, which is a pretty big headache.

Meanwhile, fellow player Phillip Dosen - who goes by ImperialHal - was suddenly given an aimbot, and opted to avoid having to quit by just not shooting while it was active. So yeah, given things like that were going on, it’s no real surprise that the tournament ended up being put on hold, with Apex Legends Esports saying that its “competitive integrity” had been “compromised”.

What does this mean for us regular folks? Well, according to Anti-Cheat Police Department, an organisation dedicated to…er…stopping cheating in the video games, any titles that use the same kind of anti-cheating software Apex does may be at risk of having similar things happen in them. That’s assuming the remote code execution exploit currently theorised by the group to be behind the issues by the organisation does turn out to be the cause.

“I would advise against playing any games protected by EAC or any EA titles once they have fixed this or can comment,” the account advised, adding: “Currently, the RCE is being abused to inject cheats into streamers machines, which means they have the capabilities to do whatever, like installing ransomware software locking up your entire PC.”

That said, it's definitely worth following any official advice from EA over this, assuming some is issued, as the Anti-Cheat Police Department is a group of volunteers who aren't directly affilated with Apex, and therefore may not have access to a complete picture regarding the scope of the issues.

As of writing, EA doesn’t look to have issued any further clarification regarding the issues, but we’ll update this article if that changes.

While you're waiting for that, you might want to read about why the game's launch was arguably a bit too successful for its own good.