Cheating in Video Games? Let’s break it down.
I’ve heard a lot of statements of people of either supporting the reasoning of cheating is good, while the others involve to oppose it, referring it as unethical or illegal. Let’s talk about cheating in single player games first.
When we talk about video games, we will automatically know games like Super Mario, God of War, PLAYERUNKNOWN’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), Call of Duty, Fortnite and a whole lot more. You can name it yourselves and jot them down by the time you read this, because there are lots and lots of games published in years, whether if it’s developed by independent studios or even famous game companies usually referred to as the triple A (AAA) companies like Ubisoft, Rockstar, Nintendo, Bethesda, Electronic Arts (EA), based on how popular the demands among consumers throughout the days of video games.
That’s a little summary of video games. Now let’s get to the main part: cheating in video games, mainly among PC gamers since it’s more accessible to them in general.
There are few things to note about whether cheating is actually legal or not, considering that most of the time, cheating is considered modifying stuff in the games in ways of which they are not supposed to, and from that statement we can assume that it is not allowed, judging by the definitions included in most End User License Agreements (EULAs).
But most of the time, these game companies don’t even care about that because it is single player, and most single player games can work offline, in which you won’t bother anyone with anything you do through the use of cheats. And when I say most companies, I actually mean most of them, since some games enforce their aggressiveness against condoning the use of cheats through anti-cheat measures, no matter if they are huge profitable ones or some small game studio trying to protect their intellectual properties (IPs), preventing even the use of mods.
Some of the usual cheats that are provided or made usually revolve around features like infinite health and ammunition, max currency or resource values, super jumps, super speed, maximum stats, one hit kills, teleportation, fly mode and more. There are more options aside from these ones, but the formers are the most common types of features included.
If you’re a first timer on this, you have a few choices on where to start. The safest and free alternative for a ‘normal’ consumer to even start cheating in single player PC games is through one of the most famous apps for doing that, which is Cheat Engine (CE).
As the name goes, CE works as a memory editor, a disassembler, a debugger. So if you install CE from the main site or the GitHub releases, you might need to exclude them from your antiviruses because it’s a memory editor and a debugger, and most antiviruses flag them for malwares; and in this case, it’s a false positive (if you’re paranoid enough, you can skip reading this part.) And for the most basic users, you only need the memory editing part, which is where you use to scan for values as depicted below.
As you can see, this is the main part of CE. You would attach it to the game process first (in this example, it is attached to the game Spiritfarer) and you can use the Value box to fill in the values that you want to scan, and change the value and scan types according to how the values are stored. You would then go to click the First Scan and afterwards and there would be multiple results where you can do further scans to filter until you get to lesser number of addresses or to the one address that stores the value, shown below:
From there you could just reduce it more until you get to the address that holds the value, add them to the address list underneath and change it. That is, one of the most basic things you could do in Cheat Engine.
And if you want to go further on learning how to use Cheat Engine to more in-depth, you could check out the built-in tutorials in CE itself as well as YouTubers like Cheat The Game or Stephen Chapman for more tutorials and showcases utilizing CE for a more advanced approach.
But what if you don’t want to find the values yourself and just use something that’s available online? Well, you can already do that. Just go to the FearlessRevolution site, they provide tons of Cheat Engine tables that you can just load into CE and use it in your games.
Aside from Cheat Engine, there are few other alternatives that operate the same thing, like ArtMoney, Squalr, CheatHappens’s CoSMOS, some of which only provide certain features while some are made for more advanced users.
But again, what if you don’t want to use Cheat Engine or the alternatives because you’re too paranoid of it even though the code is open source on GitHub, but you still want to go the cheating way? Yes, there is another way, in which we refer to as trainers. They do the same thing as how cheat tables do, except they are coded in certain language and are closed source most of the time. There are some legal sites that provide these services like WeMod (most features are free), CheatHappens (premium trainers), Plitch (formerly MegaDev, premium trainers). Most of these trainer sites are deemed safe, based on multiple virus scan reports from popular antiviruses. There are also individual trainers made by random individuals, but I would prefer not to link them for safety purposes.
That is it, some of the bits on ways of cheating in single player games, mainly for PC users. The next one: multiplayer games.
Note: The next part is going to be a bit of a controversial issue, since it involves multiplayer cheating, focused on online games, which is illegal in most countries. The use of these cheats online will result in either account or hardware bans, or going to prison, based on how severe the crime is in each country. Every information stated here below are for educational purposes only. I do not condone nor agree with the use of cheats for multiplayer purposes, simply because it ruins the fun for others and other reasons which we can only assume them as bad for everyone.
Again, I do not condone the use of cheats in online gaming. Every information provided below is for educational purposes only and not to be abused for the wrong reasons that could get you banned.
First, let’s start on some features or options that are mostly used in multiplayer hacks. They are known for using extra sensory perception (ESP) features where they could highlight other players or enemies in boxes so it can be identified even behind the walls, as shown in the photo below:
These are one of the most popular features in first person shooter (FPS) or third person shooter (TPS) type games like Battlefield 1, Battlefield V, Call of Duty: Warzone, PLAYERUNKNOWN’s Battlegrounds, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, VALORANT, Destiny, Apex Legends and more; it is mainly due to them requiring the players to kill the enemies as fast as they can, either by deathmatch or capturing the flag. And since you can see the player easily, it gives the user a very big advantage on where and when to actually kill them and gain more kill streaks for a greater score.
There are also other basic features like infinite health, ammunition, teleport for other third person games like Grand Theft Auto Online or Red Dead Online, and some of the hacks, displayed as menus (which are referred to usually as mod menus) also include options that allows the user to troll or grief other players in the worst way possible.
And this is not just limited to the official GTA Online, even the community driven Grand Theft Auto multiplayer mod FiveM is affected by the hacks, usually done by loading the menu and executing LUA codes from plugins used by the FiveM servers.
As how most cheats and hacks work, they are designed to make the user difficulties easier, except when it involves giving the player a whole lot of advantages that could exploit other players, which is exceptionally wrong, to say the least. That is why companies spend a lot of money on applying either in-house or third party anti-cheats like EasyAntiCheat, FairFight, Riot Vanguard, PunkBuster, Valve Anti-Cheat to their games, to prevent the abuse of more and more cheaters dominating the whole online community and making it unfair for the whole.
What is your verdict on this? Is it unethical? Is it a fun way to play games? Either way, as long as it is not used online, there’s nothing wrong with playing the games with cheats for fun. Some might say it ruins the whole experience, while some use it after they finished the whole game at least once to actually complete the side quests and achievements faster. As long as it’s not used in multiplayer games, I’m fine with it. What about you?
