We have been teased for seasons by respawn devs and those that like to brag about their connections to them, that something big was coming to help with the cheating.
Introducing Hyperion, which could be the thing they were hinting at! We would better describe Hyperion as an anti-tamper technology rather than anti-cheat since it does not directly detect cheats, rather (attempts to) prevents the game from being modified or its code being revealed.
Hyperion is actually used on FortNite with EasyAntiCheat & Battle Eye. Apex Legends will be taking one step closer to the protection FortNite has.
What does Hyperion do?
From their website:
- Thwart dynamic analysis attacks with our novel anti-virtual machine and anti-debugging features
- Curb static analysis with full binary encryption at rest
- Prevent tampering of your protected code
- Block untrusted third party applications
The immediate effect of this anti cheat besides causing people with older Windows versions to crash all the time, is that it’ll make datamining and cheat development a bit harder. The fact is though that it will only be a temporary slow down for something that will most likely cause way more issues than it will solve. There are already public ways of bypassing it that are shared on large cheat websites. The fact is, most anti-cheats, unless extremely invasive like Valorants, are going to be relatively easy to bypass for those with experience.
The bigger thing we at Apex Ranked are worried about is, if this is the secret thing they have been working on in the background, that we are in trouble, because we do not believe its what is needed. As HisWattson has pointed out on twitter, its more important that we hire more people. We need more hideouts to manually ban cheaters that can be available at all times. Cheaters have an unlimited amount of time to think about bypassing a games defenses and they do not have to follow any rules, its a cat and mouse game that is almost always won by the cheaters. Same with hackers and an anti virus, the hacker is always going to be a step ahead and the anti virus will be reacting for the most part. Manual examination and detection is important in the Anti Virus world as it is in the cheating world.
Within an hour of the new update with this new anti-cheat coming out, the game has already been dumped publicly. Meaning Hyperion has been bypassed already. People are starting to complain of crashing on reddit so I think the only real change we can expect is… more performance issues :/
