This guide is for those who do not want BattlEye on their system and only play single player or do not mind not being able to play on protected servers. It also does not assume where you have installed the game and should work no matter where you installed it.

It is not intended to enable cheating online. I will not be held responsible for any bans you may receive if you are caught cheating with BattlEye disabled. Consider yourself warned.

It should also be noted that this process has to be repeated after each update due to Steam replacing missing or changed files while processing the update. This also applies when fixing issues using the validate function of Steam.

First you need to get the location of the game files, and this works for any game in your Steam library:

1. Open Steam and switch to the library view if it's not already there.
   
2. Find "Outlaws of the Old West" in the list of games down the left side.
   
3. Right click that entry and select "Properties..." from the popup menu.
   
4. In the window that opened select the "LOCAL FILES" tab at the top.
   
5. Click on "BROWSE LOCAL FILES...". This will open a file browser window at the game's location.

OK, now we are ready to start removing BattlEye:

1. Navigate to the BattleEye installation by opening the folder called "Outlaws", then "Binaries", then "Win64" and finally "BattlEye". Now, you will see Uninstall_BattlEye.bat but unfortunately Microsoft decided to no longer support batch files being run with a double click so you will have to run it manually in CMD.EXE
   
2. In the file browser right click the path near the top of the window that ends "> Outlaws > Binaries > Win64 > BattlEye" and select "Copy address as text".
   
3. Hold the Windows key and press R to bring up a "Run" dialog and type "cmd" (without the quotes) in the text entry area then click OK.
   
4. Now type the following (without the quotes) "cd " followed with CTRL-V to paste the address. Now enter the command with the return key.
   
5. Your prompt should now show the address to the BattlEye folder. If nothing seemed to happen then you are on a different drive to where the game is installed. Just enter the first 2 characters of the address (E.G. "D:") and this will switch to the correct drive and will now show the BattlEye address as the prompt.
   
6. Type "Uninstall_BattlEye" and press return. This will now start the uninstall procedure, just follow the prompts.
   
7. You can now close the command prompt window.

Yep, I know that was long winded, thank Microsoft for that! But we are still not quite ready yet.

Now to make the game launch properly as it will still try to run BattlEye!

1. Navigate back one level to the "Win64" folder. Now you can optionally delete the BattlEye folder.
   
2. Delete the "Outlaws-Win64-Shipping_BE" executable.
   
3. Make a copy of the "Outlaws-Win64-Shipping" executable by selecting it and pressing CTRL-C followed with CTRL-V.
   
4. Rename the copy to "Outlaws-Win64-Shipping_BE".
   
5. Navigate back 2 levels to the "Outlaws" folder (not the base "Outlaws of the Old West" folder).
   
6. Open the "Plugins" folder.
   
7. Delete the "BattlEyeIntegration" folder and all its contents.

At last it's done, you are now ready to play without BattlEye!

NOTE: If you have file extensions showing on your system then the 2 file names will be "Outlaws-Win64-Shipping_BE.exe" and "Outlaws-Win64-Shipping.exe" so be careful to keep the .exe part of the name 🙂

Just a small update after playing for a few weeks.

First, I had some 'important information' before this update in the previous section. Initially the game was not listing servers and after some testing I came to the conclusion that was because of the removal of BattlEye. This is not the case! I was running a dedicated server on the same machine with BattlEye removed and it was using the default ports. This was conflicting with the game. After correcting this conflict the game now sees servers.

On the topic of my dedicated server running without BattlEye. For other server owners to remove BattlEye all they need to do is delete the folder "BattlEyeIntegration" inside the "Plugins" folder that's in the "Outlaws" folder! Far simpler than removing BattlEye in the client game! NOTE Technically this is all that needs to be done in the client game, all the rest is for removing the BattlEye service and stopping the game from trying to start that service!

Finally, when you connect to an unprotected server the game will still say it needs BattlEye in a small message dialog box that pops up. Just ignore the message and click OK as it will still connect fine. If you try to join a server with BattlEye protection then the game will just return to the main menu after clicking OK on that message box. On the server log they will see that you were kicked from the server for using an incompatible version of the game, you should not be banned. At least that's what I saw from my dedicated server while doing tests.