Despite having more than 10 million pre-registered players, the launch of "Phantom of the Wild" is going surprisingly well. Exploring the Breath of the Wild-inspired world has been a lot of fun, but this week an increasing number of players were having problems with the anti-cheat system, which works even after exiting the game. Late yesterday, however, developer MiHoYo apologized, delivering an update that turns off the anti-cheat after exiting the game.

The controversy stems from the fact that the anti-cheat system in "Phantom of the Opera" has kernel-level access. Without getting into too much technical jargon, this basically means that they have direct access to the raw information being processed on the computer, and while it is not unusual for both BattleEye and Easy Anti-Cheat to use kernel drivers, these systems Both run only when the game is open, a similar controversy (though on a much smaller scale) to Riot Games' Valorant, which also has a kernel-based anti-cheat system that caused an uproar earlier this year. And since both Riot Games and MiHoYo are effectively Chinese companies (Riot is owned by Tencent Games), this naturally led to many concerns about user privacy and data.

In a blog post, MiHoYo explains why. "The anti-cheat program only reads system information, it does not process, store, or upload any information." After closing the game, the anti-cheat program continues to run to prevent the use of certain external plugins that work when the game is closed." "This helps protect the fairness of Genshin Impact for all players."

The developer stated.

The developer initially intended to modify the game to only run the anti-cheat for 30 hours after the game ended, but the controversy continued to grow on various subreddits and social media. Late yesterday, the developer updated its blog post to announce that it had once again adjusted the anti-cheat system to only run when the game is running. MiHoYo stated, "The game's anti-cheat program will terminate immediately once the game client is closed or uninstalled. We deeply apologize for any inconvenience caused by this issue. We will do our utmost to ensure that such issues do not occur in the future."

The players confirmed that this was the case shortly thereafter, so it appears that this is no longer an issue. However, it is nice to see that MiHiYo was quick to address the players' concerns. We'll have more impressions of "Phantom Impact" later this week, but if you want to try it out now, you can play it for free. Just be aware that download speeds are slow.