The Finals is getting kernel-level anti-cheat, but the developers at Embark Studios aren't using that as an excuse to abandon players on Steam Deck and Linux.
Embark Studios shared an announcement on Steam last week for Update 7.3 for The Finals, which included a major security change: "As mentioned in the 7.0 patch notes, a lot of cheats these days use a kernel-driver to read and write memory to gain an unfair advantage. This means that they run in a privileged mode in the Windows operating system, making it unlikely and in some cases impossible to detect via Anti-Cheat in the game client."
"The technical solution to combat this is kernel-driver Anti-Cheat. We believe that this is, and will be, a requirement for every competitive multiplayer game for the foreseeable future."
Normally, kernel-level anti-cheat is a death knell for gamers playing on Linux, including the Steam Deck, since 9 times out of 10, this type of anti-cheat isn't supported on Linux. There are exceptions, though, which apparently includes The Finals.
In a community update on the game's official Discord server, which was also reposted on Reddit, the devs shared some good news, saying, "Hey guys! There are no plans to drop support for SteamOS/Proton/Wine and/or SteamDeck, despite us not officially supporting the platform, we will do our [utmost] best to maintain your ability to play!"
Another developer also chimed in to add, "We're working pretty closely with CodeWeavers to QA every release we put out there since about Season 5, and I don't see a reason to stop that. It's not exactly a collaboration, but we do catch issues with SteamDeck early because at the very least they do a pass on the game before we release a patch."
"Do we miss some things once in a while, absolutely. It's not our primary platform after all, but we understand there is a pretty passionate and growing playerbase on SteamDeck. Please keep reporting issues here, to our support, or report them to the Proton devs directly, and we will investigate what we can do to fix things."
This is great news for anyone playing The Finals on the Steam Deck or Linux in general, and comes as a surprise, although perhaps not as much as it might have been a year or two ago.
With Windows 10 nearing end of life in October, more gamers are taking a closer look at SteamOS, besides those already using it on the Steam Deck. While SteamOS hasn't received an official full PC release yet, other gaming-focused Linux distributions, like Bazzite, have been gaining popularity as alternatives to Windows 11.
That might explain why Embark Studios isn't just up and abandoning its Linux players, which is a nice change of pace. Of course, nothing's set in stone. Other similar games supported Linux in the past, only to end up dropping it down the line, like Apex Legends.
Hopefully, that's not what happens here, but at least for the time being Linux gamers will be able to continue enjoying The Finals, which is currently in its seventh season since launching in 2023.
