Marathon and Security: The War on Cheaters Has Already Begun

One of the biggest scourges afflicting online shooters (in fact, it would be better to say most online games) is called cheaters, those individuals who have nothing better to do than cheat, ruining their own and others' experience. A competitive title like Marathon will inevitably have to deal with this problem, but its developer Bungie intends to be prepared.

Marathon's Anti-Cheat Systems

A long message on Bungie's official website lists the measures that will be adopted to make life difficult for cheaters. Marathon will rely on dedicated servers that have absolute authority over what happens in-game, monitoring users' movements, shots, actions, loot, and inventory: any attempt to issue a fraudulent instruction to the game will be immediately rejected. In other words, tricks like teleporting around the map or setting an infinite number of ammunition should not work.

These servers will guarantee high stability for the game: even in the event of high data packet loss, key elements such as bullet trajectories will be tracked with great precision. In case of disconnection, it will be possible to rejoin your match; however, if the disconnection was due to a network infrastructure problem, Bungie will try to return to all users the items they possessed at the beginning of the match.

The fog of war will limit the map information available to players, which should make certain types of cheats, such as wall hacks, less effective. Trying to use certain shortcuts could be very costly: Bungie promises permanent bans to anyone caught cheating, with no appeal. For Marathon, the US company has rewritten its security codes from scratch, also implementing the external anti-cheat software BattlEye.

The Networking and Security Trailer