A cracked version of Resident Evil Village that works better than DRM • Eurogamer.de

Update from July 15, 2021: Commenting on the situation, Capcom said: “The team is working to correct PC performance issues. It should be available soon – we’ll provide more details soon.”

Original article dated July 15, 2021: Recent reports of a pirated, DRM-free, and “cracked” version of Resident Evil Village that outperformed Capcom’s launch code in terms of performance have piqued my interest and alternately stunned me. I can accept that anti-hacking measures are necessary, and I can also accept that its evolution requires a certain amount of CPU power these days. But to spread the game it due to Who DRM has performance issues, and it crosses the red line – something a developer or publisher should never do. However I can confirm that Resident Evil Village runs more smoothly on PC in its cracked form than the erroneous official version.

In fact, the hacked code solves the two most important performance problems posed by my colleague Alex Battaglia at Resident Evil Village PC Tech Review has been established. First, the main animation during combat – enemies retreating or pouncering on you – causes noticeable choppy in a split second. In the original test, we played at 60fps and found that stutter could go as low as 66ms — four frames — but if the frame rate wasn’t limited, I was able to determine it could then go as high as 130ms. This is a fundamental problem, especially since it is not surprising that shooting zombies is an important part of a survival horror shooter. The second problem concerns the encounters with Lady Dimitrescu’s daughters – when they get to the game, the frame rate stutters significantly and constantly. None of these issues appear in the console versions of the game.

By repeating these tests in this article, I’ve noticed that in the past two months since the release of Resident Evil Village on PC, Capcom hasn’t done anything to address these obvious issues. However, I can confirm that the cracked version does just that by addressing the two major performance issues. In his NFO notes, the hacker talks about two DRM systems used in Resident Evil Village: Denuvo and Capcom’s anti-piracy technology, which supposedly within than Denuvo and makes it less perfect. Notes indicate that DRM-heavy CPU countermeasures apply to this key animation – which explicitly points to copy protection as the cause of game performance issues.

And now comes the crack: Regardless of whether the hacking team is aware of the reason behind the performance issues, it is a fact that the crack fixed it in all the scenarios I tested. Battles now take place smoothly and steadily, without stuttering in a matter of seconds. While there are doubts about missing some animations for the pirated version of the game, the battles against Lady Dimitrescu’s daughters continue without sudden jerks and stutters. The RE engine is as performing as you’d hope – I was able to play on almost console-like settings with ray tracing activated on the RTX 3080 at frame rates between 90fps and 160fps.

The hack’s success in solving these long-standing issues points to two possible scenarios: First, hackers see it similar to ours – it’s actually the DRM that caused the problems in the first place, and they’re doing us a great service by removing the he-she. And if the hackers aren’t being honest with us, the alternative is probably more straightforward: that they’ve tweaked the game in ways that Capcom wasn’t willing to do in the past few months.

The point is that any justification for integrating DRM is void if the pirated version of the game offers a better experience than the purchased and paid version. I shared my findings with Capcom Monday night for comment and also attempted to contact Denuvo for a response. However, I haven’t received an answer yet. However, as of this writing, I believe Capcom owes an apology to its customers, but more importantly, they urgently need to release a patch that will fix the issues and bring the official code in line with the performance of the pirated version.

What does this ultimately mean for anyone who bought the game? It’s not too hard to find a crack on your own that works with the standard Steam download (but doesn’t seem to be compatible with current savegames), but this is rarely recommended. I have good things about it RE . Framework It supposedly fixes stuttering issues and includes quality-of-life improvements such as the field-of-view slider. I haven’t been able to test it myself – the injected code seems to prevent prompts from appearing, making it impossible to progress in the game. However, others have reported that it works. It’s hard to imagine tampering with a game’s DRM, so perhaps there is a way to solve this problem without resorting to pirated content. There are also rumors of missing animations in the cracked version, but this does not apply to this mode.

At this point the ball is halfway through Capcom and I hope to see positive reaction and action soon – and we’ll get back to you when the time is right.