Liberty Day has arrived in Helldivers 2, and so has a problem. The free AR-23L Liberator we covered on Saturday goes to every account that has been online in the last 30 days as of Monday evening, which has sent a lot of lapsed players back to the launcher. Many of them are hitting a wall: the game swapped its anti-cheat from GameGuard to Easy Anti-Cheat on October 20, and on a PC that has not run Helldivers 2 since, the old files tend to break the launch. Here is how much time you have, what is going wrong, and the fixes that are working.
Watch the short YouTubeYou have until Monday at 6:59pm Eastern, and one earlier login already counts
Arrowhead’s rule for the rifle is that it goes to all active accounts, defined as accounts online in the last 30 days, on October 26 at 23:59 CET. That is 6:59pm Eastern on Monday. The important part for anyone stuck tonight: if you played at any point since September 26, you are already on the list and do not need to get in this weekend. If you have not, a single successful login before the Monday cutoff is all it takes, so there is a full day to work through the fixes below.
The anti-cheat changed on October 20, and old GameGuard files are the usual culprit
Patch 7.2.0 on October 20 replaced GameGuard with Easy Anti-Cheat. Arrowhead said GameGuard “wasn’t as effective as it could have been” and called EAC “an industry standard used in over 200 games”, adding that Steam Deck and Linux play is unaffected and that no hardware requirements change. What the announcement did not spell out is that GameGuard’s leftovers on a PC can stop EAC from starting, and that older mod files in the game’s bin folder, including ReShade and upscaler DLLs, will be blocked.
The subreddit has carried around sixty launch and anti-cheat threads this week, with titles like “Thanks Arrowhead, I didn’t wanna play anyways” and “HATE THIS NEW ANTI-CHEAT” climbing past a thousand upvotes, and a separate 1,200-upvote thread about EAC flagging a cheat after the game was closed. The explanation in that one is simple: quitting with Alt+F4 instead of the menu leaves the anti-cheat running. Arrowhead’s 7.2.1 hotfix on October 22 fixed a crash when squad members joined or left, but the launch problems are a local-files issue, which is why the fix is on your end.
The fix list, in the order that works
These steps come from the community-run Helldivers wiki’s Easy Anti-Cheat troubleshooting page, updated today, and match what players report working in the launch threads.
- Remove GameGuard first. Open the game folder (Steam, right-click Helldivers 2, Manage, Browse local files), go into the EasyAntiCheat folder and run gguninst.exe. If a bin\GameGuard folder is still there afterwards, delete it. Then use Restart, not Shut down: with Fast Startup on, a shutdown keeps the old driver loaded.
- Clear out mod files. In the bin folder, delete any DLLs that are not the game’s own, such as dxgi.dll, d3d9.dll, d3d11.dll and the ReShade files. Overlays like Lossless Scaling can also stop the launch.
- Verify the game files. If it still fails, delete the bin and data folders and verify again in Steam. It re-downloads a lot, but it rebuilds a clean install.
- Repair EAC itself. In an administrator Command Prompt inside the EasyAntiCheat folder, run EasyAntiCheat_EOS_Setup.exe repair. If the game says EAC is not installed, run the setup as administrator and choose Install or Repair.
- “Could not connect to EAC network”. Restart the PC, turn off any VPN, and test on a phone hotspot. If the hotspot works, power-cycle your router. Allowing Epic Games domains through your antivirus and firewall, and running netsh winhttp reset proxy as administrator, clears the rest.
- Steam Deck and Linux. Install the Proton EasyAntiCheat Runtime from Steam. Virtual machines, cloud gaming services and ARM systems are blocked by EAC and cannot be worked around.
Liberty Day itself is live on the Super Destroyer, decorations and all. If the steps above do not get you aboard, Arrowhead’s support is on Zendesk, and the known-issues list in the 7.2.0 notes is the place to check before filing.
