WARDOGS does not officially require Secure Boot. The Steam store page lists Windows 10 as the minimum operating system and states no Secure Boot or TPM 2.0 prerequisite, so a system without it is not locked out by design.
In practice, enabling Secure Boot is one of the most reliable fixes for a launch crash. WARDOGS uses kernel-level Easy Anti-Cheat, disclosed on its own Steam page, and players on the official Steam support thread repeatedly confirmed that turning Secure Boot on resolved a crash that produced a dump file with no readable error.
What the official requirements actually say
This is worth separating from what other shooters do, because several recent large-scale titles have made Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 a hard requirement and players reasonably assume WARDOGS did the same.
It did not. The published minimum specification is Windows 10 with an i5-8600 or Ryzen 5 3500, 16GB of RAM and a GTX 1660 or RX 590. Secure Boot appears nowhere in it, and neither does TPM.
What the store page does disclose is that the game uses kernel-level anti-cheat. That is the detail which explains why Secure Boot keeps coming up even though it is not mandatory.
No Secure Boot requirement is published. Treat it as a fix to try, not a prerequisite you must satisfy.
Why a kernel-level anti-cheat cares
Easy Anti-Cheat installs a driver at the highest privilege level on your machine so it can observe tampering that a normal user-space application cannot see.
Secure Boot exists to stop unsigned or altered code loading during startup. A machine with it disabled is a machine where a malicious driver can be loaded before the anti-cheat is running, which is precisely the scenario the anti-cheat is designed to detect.
That is the mechanism behind the symptom. The game is not checking a box marked "Secure Boot" and refusing to start; the anti-cheat is failing to initialise in an environment it cannot verify, and the failure surfaces as a crash.
Check whether Secure Boot is already on
Do this before touching your BIOS, because on many recent prebuilt systems it is already enabled and the crash has a different cause entirely.
- Open System Information — Press Windows + R, type msinfo32 and press Enter.
- Read the System Summary — Find the row labelled Secure Boot State.
- On — Secure Boot is already enabled. This is not your problem — work through the crash guide instead.
- Off — Secure Boot is available but disabled. Enabling it in BIOS is worth trying.
- Unsupported — Your system is likely installed in legacy BIOS mode. See the section below before changing anything.
Enabling it without breaking your install
Secure Boot is a motherboard setting, changed in BIOS or UEFI rather than anywhere in Windows. The exact menu name varies by manufacturer, but it usually sits under a Boot or Security tab.
The important precaution is that Secure Boot requires your drive to use the GPT partition scheme and UEFI boot mode. A Windows installation that was set up in legacy or CSM mode will not boot after you enable it, which is what turns a five-minute settings change into an evening of recovery.
Note your current configuration before you change it, so you can put it back if the game still crashes.
Changing BIOS settings carries its own risk. If msinfo32 reports Secure Boot State as Unsupported, check your disk and boot mode before enabling anything.
If Secure Boot was not the problem
Secure Boot is the first item on the crash checklist, not the whole of it. If the game still fails after enabling it, the remaining causes are well documented.
Repair Easy Anti-Cheat through its own installer, disable Discord, ShadowPlay and the Steam overlay, and check for input-method conflicts. A crash that takes the whole PC down with it points at a third-party driver rather than at the game.
A failure that shows a numbered error code is a different category altogether: that is an authentication failure against the game servers, not a crash on your machine.
Secure Boot questions answered
Short answers to the way this question is usually asked.
- Does WARDOGS require Secure Boot? — Not officially. The Steam page lists Windows 10 as the minimum and states no Secure Boot or TPM requirement.
- Do you need Secure Boot to play WARDOGS? — No, but enabling it resolves a common launch crash, so many players end up needing it in practice.
- Why does Secure Boot fix the crash then? — Easy Anti-Cheat runs at kernel level and cannot verify a startup environment where unsigned code could load first.
- Does WARDOGS need TPM 2.0? — No TPM requirement is published for WARDOGS.
- How do I check if Secure Boot is on? — Run msinfo32 and read the Secure Boot State row in the System Summary.
- Is it safe to enable Secure Boot? — Usually, but only if Windows is installed in UEFI mode on a GPT disk. A legacy-mode install will not boot afterwards.
- Where do I enable it? — In your motherboard BIOS or UEFI, normally under a Boot or Security tab — not in Windows.