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One blemish on Throne and Liberty’s barnstorming release – one day in and it’s so far up the Steam charts it’s only visible by telescope – has been some unexpected Steam Deck trouble. Despite the fantasy MMORPG having worked fine on the Deck in previous betas, a celebrating Amazon employee must have drunkenly nudged the ‘Break game on Linux’ lever at the office launch party, as reports began trickling in of handheld players being kicked from servers. The cause: Easy Anti-Cheat, Throne and Liberty’s hacker thwarter of choice, declaring an error.
Fortunately, as of right now (October 2nd), all seems well again – I’ve got Throne and Liberty running on a Steam Deck OLED as I type this, and can mosey around next to fellow online players without issues. A lot of them are turning into wolves. Most of them, in fact. Maybe too many.
As for what actually happened with Easy Anti-Cheat, it sounds like either developers NCSoft or publishers Amazon Games simply neglected to enable Easy Anti-Cheat support for the Linux-powered SteamOS in the final release build. Judging by Valve’s documentation, this isn’t a complicated process – perhaps hence why it was overlooked – but it does require a dash of manual input. Without this, the game assumes that EAC is missing, and blocks off online play completely rather than potentially let any do-badders in while its guard is down.
No-one seems to have been outright banned as a result of attempting to play on a Steam Deck, so this could be considered a happy ending. Definitely more so than other recent cases we’ve seen where anti-cheat has proven a stumbling block to portable compatibility: Wuthering Waves was only briefly playable on the Deck before an update blocked it off again, and despite how the BattlEye anti-cheat software can easily be made compatible with SteamOS, its addition to GTA Online last month involved Rockstar just… choosing not to? I guess? And the less said about Fortnite, the better.
Throne and Liberty, at least, is now having an easier time of it. I’m prodigiously bad at guessing how games will fare in Valve’s Steam Deck Verified ranking system, but if I were to simply ignore that and speculate anyway, I’d go for ‘Playable’: some of the UI text is absolutely microscopic on the 7in screen, but it controls fine, and typically runs above 30fps on Low settings. I’d swap FSR upscaling from Balanced to Quality mode, though, just to make character models look less like they’re disintegrating into sand when they move.