At launch, the PC version of RiME suffered from pretty poor performance. It turns out part of that instability is due to the implementation of Denuvo.

What’s Denuvo? That’s the notoriously tough to crack anti-piracy software that large publishers often pay to use on their new releases. It takes the pirate community time to hack through it (sometimes, at least, as they’ve been super fast for some games in the past), so the software can only be purchased and played legitimately before a crack comes out.

RiME was cracked in a week. The developers announced that, following the crack, they’d remove Denuvo entirely for everyone. That’s good news for folks who bought it fair and square, because the implementation of Denuvo was so bad that it actually made the game run poorly.

The cracker that broke into RiME and tossed the illegal version online goes by the name of Baldman. He went off on the Denuvo implementation, expletives included, and explained that the anti-piracy checks occurred far too often and actually made the game’s performance suffer. Here he is.

Game is super nice and you should support devs, buy it when you can do it. But the game will be much better without that huge abomination called Denuvo. 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 – In previous games like Sgw3, Nier, Prey there were only about 1000 “triggers” called, so we have x300 here. Next – 300,000 called “triggers” were just warmup for Denuvo, after 30 minutes of gameplay it became 2 fucking MILLIONS of called “triggers”. Protection now calls about 10-30 triggers every second during actual gameplay, slowing game down. In previous games like Sgw3, Nier, Prey there were only about 1-2 “triggers” called every several minutes during gameplay, so do the math. Don’t forget that triggers is under VM and heavily obfuscated, which obviously does not improve perfomance.

Whether the fault lies with Denuvo or the developers of RiME regarding this implementation is up in the air. For now, it looks like the crack will benefit pirates and normal buyers as the game runs much better.