Earlier today, we shared the news that Doom: The Dark Ages’ Denuvo DRM protection has been cracked. Now, only three days before launch, we’ve just learned upcoming triple-A behemoth Crimson Desert will have that layer of protection on PC.
The Gamer pointed out the update to the game’s Steam page, which according to SteamDB, was altered to add the Denuvo box on 12th March. Now, with only three days to go before it releases, the news is spreading, and there’s a ripple of discontent amongst players excited for the game across various social media platforms.
Though this might seem like a major misstep to veteran PC players who are well aware of Denuvo-related performance woes in the past, Crimson Desert crossed 3m wishlists earlier this month and is riding a lot of hype out there. Regardless of where reviews end up landing, it seems that Pearl Abyss already has a likely hit on its hands.
The DRM-based discovery has landed like a meteor on the game’s Steam forums and subreddit, splitting a community of PC players that seemed auto-convinced the game will be awesome prior to release. “It’s scummy they didn’t tell anyone,” a user stated after saying it’s likely the game’s performance will suffer because of it. Another one added the comment would no doubt be “downvoted” by the developer’s “fanboys” despite “speaking facts.”
You can scroll down and find a similar back-and-forth between those who see Denuvo as bad news most of the time and players who just want to get their hands on the game and judge it for themselves. “Yeah, it was expected to happen, which really sucks,” one potential buyer admitted. It’s here where I must note that most triple-A releases these days include at least one form of DRM, and most of the time it’s Denuvo… which so far has proven to do its job of protecting hot new releases from pirates quite well.
On Steam, some users are trying to get people to cancel their preorders ahead of the game’s 19th March launch. Most posts can roughly be translated to shrugs or people claiming they’ll buy the game on console instead. Many players are simply hoping the performance hit isn’t too bad and they can later apply a crack to offset Denuvo’s impact despite being paying customers, which is the big issue with the DRM solution.
At the time of writing, we don’t have access to performance benchmarks of Crimson Desert’s final PC release, so it remains to be seen if all these concerns are valid. The past has taught us to be wary of Denuvo implementation in games which are heavy on the CPU, however, so it’s easy to see where veterans are coming from. It’s currently unclear whether the game will also have Denuvo in its Epic Games Store version.
