Rime's Denuvo Defeated: Developer Gets To Work On DRM Free Version As Performance Hit Details Emerge

from the that-was-fast dept

As we had recently discussed, Tequila Works, makers of RiME, had promised pissed off customers that once the game was cracked and its Denuvo DRM defeated, it would release a Denuvo-free version of the game via a patch. The crack of the game came about almost immediately after this statement was made, because of course it was. To their credit, Tequila Works made good on its promise of a patch, while also blaming the use of Denuvo on Grey Box, its publisher.

But there's a secondary story here. The actual impact DRM has tended to have throughout its history has been mostly to annoy legitimate customers by either keeping them from playing the game they purchased at all, or by resulting in negative impacts on game performance. For RiME, it appears the issue is the latter, and the person who cracked the game is offering details of how Denuvo tried desperately to turn the dial on its software up to eleven, almost certainly impacting performance of the game.

In a fanfare of celebrations, rising cracking star Baldman announced that he had defeated the latest v4+ iteration of Denuvo and dumped a cracked copy of RiME online. While encouraging people to buy what he describes as a “super nice” game, Baldman was less complimentary about Denuvo. Labeling the anti-tamper technology a “huge abomination,” the cracker said that Denuvo’s creators had really upped their efforts this time out. People like Baldman who work on Denuvo talk of the protection calling on code ‘triggers.’ For RiME, things were reportedly amped up to 11. “In Rime that ugly creature went out of control – how do you like three fucking hundreds of THOUSANDS calls to ‘triggers’ during initial game launch and savegame loading? Did you wonder why game loading times are so long – here is the answer,” Baldman explained. “In previous games like Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, NieR Automata, Prey there were only about 1000 ‘triggers’ called, so we have x300 here.”

Those triggers are callbacks from the game to Denuvo's servers to verify it's legitimacy. This increase in triggers was almost certainly designed to make the game harder or more laborious to crack, though that obviously didn't work. But, as Baldman continues, the shocking 300k triggers just in the launch and loading screens was only the start. After a mere thirty minutes of gameplay, he recorded two million triggers. It's worth noting that RiME's rollout didn't go off as smoothly as the developer wanted, largely because of performance issues being reported by those who bought it. Baldman attempted to explain why at least part of those woes were likely this roided-up version of Denuvo mucking up performance.

“Protection now calls about 10-30 triggers every second during actual gameplay, slowing game down. In previous games like Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, NieR Automata, Prey there were only about 1-2 ‘triggers’ called every several minutes during gameplay, so do the math.” Only making matters worse, the cracker says, is the fact the triggers are heavily obfuscated under a virtual machine, which further affects performance.

It seems pretty clear that whatever the percentage of the performance troubles RiME had that are the result of Denuvo, that percentage number is not zero. The DRM is having a performance impact at some level and it seems likely that having it ramped up so high would only increase the draw on power it needs to run. Denuvo is already denying that its software was responsible for the performance issues, but that should be easily cleared up now that Tequila Works is releasing a Denuvo-free version.

What remains unclear is why any developer or publisher would use Denuvo any longer. Pissing off your legitimate customers for protection that can be measured in hours is no way to build a customer base.

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Filed Under: denuvo, drm, performance, rime

Companies: grey box