We’ve earlier reported about the implementation of EasyAntiCheat on Watch Dogs 2 – and how the Ubisoft game installs a driver in kernel mode and a service that monitors your systems’ operating files (when Watch Dogs 2 is running). In that piece, we said that “This mechanism is also running even when you’re in single-player-only – and even offline – modes, meaning that you’re not getting out of its crosshairs no matter how you are playing the game”. Now, there seems to be a way to bypass the system monitoring altogether and enjoy the game in single-player. The way to do so, however, varies whether you’re running the game on Steam or on Uplay.
If you’re a Steam user, right-click the Watch Dogs 2 game on your library, hit “Properties”, “Launch options”, and input “-eac_launcher” like in the below picture.
If you’re using Ubisoft’s Uplay system, you select Watch Dogs 2, “Properties”, “Game launch arguments”, and input the same “-eac_launcher” in the pop-up command window, as shown below:
Once you’ve done so in your game platform of choice, start the game. If you did everything correctly, a splash screen should appear, warning you that “EasyAntiCheat is not installed and multiplayer will be disabled”, prompting you to reinstall it in order to resume online activities (though all you really have to do is remove the command-line parameter and you’re back on multi-player):
Now you can rest easy, playing the game the way it’s meant to be played: with you as the proverbial watchdog, without having to worry of prying eyes or unwanted potential privacy violations and undesired anti-cheat measures. At least now you have the choice whether to use or not to use the game’s intrusive anti-cheat mechanism, even if you do have to make do without multi-player modes. But there’s always a bright-side, and in this case, there are two of them: not only have you stopped the evil corporation from spying on you (taking a leaf from the game itself), but now you also have popular overlay applications such as MSI’s Afterburner or streaming apps like OBS working again. Knock yourselves out.
