Don't use Denuvo, Bethesda

[min3r95]

Denuvo is a cancer to this industry, it contributes nothing positive, it hurt only the customers, and Denuvo as a company have literally nothing good to offer, they do not have any creative,anything to add, they're helping nobody and profiting off of it.
They're a leech, a definition of an industry leech.

Plus, forced online authorization in single player games is totally nonsense so stop using Denuvo, Bethesda.

"What is Denuvo"

Check this and this

[Joker]

i agree

[Ace]

I'm fairly sure they won't be using it again.

[Joker]

im p sure they will use denuvo again lol

[HumorDash]

Please for the love of God respectfully do not use denuvo. It doesn't work please don't use it. People will buy the game more if you don't add denuvo.

Do you like money?

[Cris]

What the F is denuvo?

[lukaself]

Originally posted by Cris:

What the F is denuvo?

It's a DRM which has been long criticized for causing performance issues, outages due to requiring a recurring online connection to third party servers for the game to start, even in single player and hardware incompatibilities - especially with the Steam deck, causing 24 hours lock outs when changing Proton layers. It can prevent you from playing when the activation servers are overloaded or unreachable and will disable your game permanently if the DRM isn't removed when the servers close, posing a threat to game preservation.

It's less and less used mainly because it causes controversies and pushback every time but some companies just aren't very reactive and/or would rather obsess over non-paying customers than making sure paying ones have the best experience possible.

[min3r95]

Originally posted by Cris:

What the F is denuvo?

I could give you a longer explaination if you want. Might gonna edit my op to include the explanations for people who don't know.

Denuvo has 2 products, anti-tamper aka DRM and Anti Cheat, here I'm talking about the DRM.
Denuvo DRM is a middleware that's usually implemented into executable files of games, or a dll files inside of their folders, making them several times bigger than usual.

Denuvo implemented games rely on 3rd party DRM server to generate authorization tokens in order for the games to be launchable(forced online authorization). These tokens are expirable and can be break under circumstances(reinstalling/update OS/driver,switching Proton(Linux), changing hardware) render the games useless.

The tokens won't be automatically acquired by themselves, you need to launch the games in online mode for them to be acquired.
The tokens can only be acquired for a limited number of times(usually 5)per 24 hours, once you reach the limit for whatever reason, you will be blocked out of your games, and will need to wait until the next day to be able to "activate" the game again.You need to ask for permission to play the game you paid for.
Denuvo can also randomly crap out and prevent you from playing, even though you haven't reach the activation limit yet. You can search steam forum for "codefusion" to see.
If you try to launch the game in offline mode without an already acquired authorization token, a message will appear asking you to go online, if for whatever reason you can acquire a new token, a message will direct you to the codefusion website.

You can play Denuvo implemented games in offline mode, but it won't be indefinitely.
In fact you can't play the games at all if there's no token or for some reason it's cannot a token(server outage) regardless of whether you're online or offline.

[Joker]

denuvo anti-cheat was added to eternal. after 1 week it was removed because a vocal minority doesn't understand how it worked. present tense because it'd be insane to assume they've learned anything these past 4 years.

[lukaself]

Originally posted by Joker:

denuvo anti-cheat was added to eternal. after 1 week it was removed because a vocal minority doesn't understand how it worked. present tense because it'd be insane to assume they've learned anything these past 4 years.

A global company wouldn't remove a middleware costing them seven figures just because a "few" people complained. That would be downplaying the situation way too much.

The pushback was massive due in part to the established and well deserved negative reputation of the company making it and the fact that a Kernel Anti-Cheat was clearly overkill for a non-competitive game - especially as it was initially installed without your consent, whether you played multiplayer or not. They tried to redress that by making it optional but the damage was done. It was the first game to ever use Denuvo Anti-Cheat, which means literally no-one knew how it worked and ID failed to address that first, a clear misstep in communication adding fuel to the already raging fire.

Denuvo Anti-Cheat has gone mostly unused since, I can count on one hand the amount of games currently using it.

[Neon Triangle]

At the very least I don't see Denuvo Anti-Cheat being here, since it's been rumored that Mircrosoft is going to block kernel access with Windows 11 in the future (which is something that OSes like Arch Linux already do if I recall). But considering how many games still use the main version of Denuvo, I wouldn't be surprised if this game has it on launch at the very least. Starfield is already proof that Bethesda doesn't learn, after all.

[lukaself]

Originally posted by Neon Triangle:

Starfield is already proof that Bethesda doesn't learn, after all.

Starfield doesn't use Denuvo, though. None of the games developed by Bethesda Softworks do, only those they published.

[Cris]

Thank you very much to min3r95 and lukaself for the explanations, understood perfectly. Great explanations. I'm not into too many recent/multiplayer games, mostly indies and light games for short sessions so I didn't know. I mean I knew about this practices, especially the "connect to internet to play single player mode", but didn't know it was so much BS. The part of losing the games I paid for because of some screwed up system was definitely the most scary thing I read.

Oh and yeah, fu*k Denuvo! And anyone who keeps giving them business as well!

[Grampire II]

- I'll be extremely surprised if Doom: The Dark Ages uses Denuvo. Even moreso if it has an active multiplayer mode.

- I won't be surprised if D:TDA requires some form of online authentication/login service.

For the most part domestic companies are starting to move away from it and are opting for SaS solutions instead - Bethesda included. It's really a pretty outdated marketing tool - despite being extremely difficult to crack (several games have gone for more than a year without a crack as of today), it's probably not worth the "cost."

Japanese developers continue to use it - but in the case of something like Street Fighter 6, it's already a strange fit since the main draw for that game is online vs. play. (It does have an active SP mode.) Denuvo and products like it should never be a fire and forget solution and should consider the product they're being attached to. I would even argue it made some sense using it for Eternal.

Just an added bit of history - D2016 had a loyal, if not somewhat niche, MP following that was deeply marred by cheaters. They very much wanted some form of anti-cheat added to that game, and several people I know who played it welcomed DAC as a possible solution. My guess is the existing contract with Denuvo gave them some sort of packaging pricing to add it over something like EAC.

Battlemode was a pretty minor part of Eternal so it didn't make much sense, but there was a precursor request for anti-cheat. Id did a somewhat bad job of reading the room twice I suppose.

[Joker]

i suggest you at least try to hide it

[Neon Triangle]

Originally posted by lukaself:

Originally posted by Neon Triangle:

Starfield is already proof that Bethesda doesn't learn, after all.

Starfield doesn't use Denuvo, though. None of the games developed by Bethesda Softworks do, only those they published.

To be honest I was referring to the quality of Starfield itself, it shows that Bethesda still has a habit of being grossly inconsistent with their products. But yeah, I should have just said Rage 2 or something, even though ID removed it Bethesda was probably the one pushing for it in the first place. Or when boxed copies of Oblivion had SecuRom, which actually required you to have the disc in the drive to uninstall the game.

What I'm saying is, they love repeating history in some way or another.