One of the drawbacks to the launch of Throne and Liberty – one day and so high on the Steam charts that it can only be seen through a telescope – was unexpected issues with the Steam deck. Even though the fantasy MMORPG ran well on Deck in previous betas, as reports began, a celebrating Amazon employee had to drunkenly nudge the “Stop Game on Linux” lever during the office’s launch party is coming portable players kicked from servers. Reason: Easy Anti-Cheat, Throne and Liberty, the hacker’s chosen foil reporting the bug.
Fortunately, now (October 2) everything seems fine again – as I write this, Throne and Liberty is running on the Steam Deck OLED and I can move around other online players without any problems. Many of them turn into wolves. Actually, most of them. Maybe too much.
And why? Actually what happened with Easy Anti-Cheat, it looks like NCSoft developers or publishers Amazon Games simply neglected to include Easy Anti-Cheat support for the Linux-based SteamOS operating system in the final release. Judging by Valve DocumentationIt’s not a complicated process – perhaps that’s why it’s been overlooked – but it does require a bit of manual data entry. Without this, the game assumes that EAC is missing and completely blocks online play rather than potentially letting in any bad guys when its guard is down.
It appears that no one was completely banned from trying to play on the Steam Deck, so this can be considered a ecstatic ending. Much more so than in other recent cases where anti-cheat protection has proven to be an obstacle to mobile compatibility: Wuthering Waves was only playable on board for a compact time before an update blocked it again, and this was despite the anti-cheat software BattlEye can be easily adapted to SteamOS. Adding it to GTA Online last month involved Rockstar simply… choosing not to? I guess? The less said about Fortnite, the better.
At least Throne and Liberty is having an easier time now. I’m incredibly bad at guessing how games will fare in Valve’s Steam Deck Verified ranking system, but if I were to just ignore it and speculate anyway, I’d go with “playable”: some of the UI text is absolutely microscopic on a 7-inch screen, but it controls well and usually runs above 30fps on low settings. However, I would change the FSR scaling from Balanced to Quality to make the character models look less like they are crumbling to sand as they move.
