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Denuvo, and in fact ALL anti-piracy countermeasures (including kernel level anti-cheat like nGuard Protect, or Vanguard) added to computer software, is cancerware. It does not do anything to prevent piracy beyond maybe a month depending on cracking scene interest. But it does severely negatively affect game performance. In some cases, games with Denuvo removed have seen +40 fps and more for end users with absolutely no change to game settings or hardware.
Denuvo runs game functions within a VM, and uses the game license, your machine HWID, and magic numbers to make calculations so it can decrypt the partially encrypted by Denuvo game code. It does this EVERY FRAME. Computers have become fast enough that people like you might say you dont notice the difference because your copy of the game runs at 60fps “most of the time” with dips into the 30s or 40s. But without that literal circus of cancerware your game could be running at 90+ fps with absolutely no change from you. Now why, exactly, does Denuvo need to do these checks with your license and HWID every single frame? Well, you silly wallet, your license might expire or be revoked inbetween frames.
Denuvo, and all DRM, only harms genuine paying customers. Its only a minor inconvenience to game cracking groups and pirates.
Just because kernel level anti-cheat is bad doesn’t mean that Denuvo is somehow good. They are both equally bad.
I mean, did we all forget SecuROM? It is malware, defined by most operating systems and anti-virus software as malware. Thats what all DRM is.
There are exactly the same amount (if not more) of trolls, “bootlickers,” and censorship on Lemmy as Reddit. You just might notice it less because you agree with it or aren’t in the most affected communities or instances (like the ml instances). A lot more bots here on Lemmy than I recall on Reddit (which was like, 5 years ago, which may be part of the reason admittedly). Entire instances that feel dedicated to troll accounts (like HexBear). Lemmy has zero protection from a troll setting up multiple instances to use to spam past bans or instance blocking AFAIK.
There is no alternative. None of them are better. They’re all different flavors of the exact same thing because of the people that use them. They’re all equally bad, just different window dressing. That’s it.
People have just become worse in the least year or two. Globally. Like a switch turned everyone from trying to be a decent person to just being the worst version of themselves towards everyone else. And this is magnified on the internet because of anonymity.
These are the players that get angry when people say they don’t want to play the game. And then act clueless when the game is dead due to low player counts. The people that also don’t want to play in lobbies with other high level players and only want to Noob Stomp.
Its why I call this genre of game “Scum Sponge.” Because it attracts all of the worst people on the planet due to the game design rewarding that kind of player behavior. I am thankful for it, because it means other games have less of them.
I certainly hope blocking people in the game does not stop you from matching into each other’s lobbies and only prevents voice/chat with each other.
Xbox tried the “blocking people prevents matchmaking into their games” way in the early days of the Xbox 360 when accounts had a reputation system and all that. Know what the end result was? All the best players and pro players at games were waiting in 10+ hour queues to find a match. Because people were blocking everyone that beat them. So Xbox ditched that, and that was absolutely the correct call.
Blocking should absolutely never prevent matchmaking from doing its job and getting everyone into games. And listen, I hate Extraction Shooters. I played the Arc Raiders closed and open betas, and the server slam, so its not like I have no experience with the game. I lament that another fun PvE Coop Shooter was stolen from everyone to be added to the Scum Sponge genre. But I still think the game’s matchmaking should function correctly.
New Vegas wasn’t a Bethesda game, it was developed by Obsidian and only published by Bethesda. Sure, it runs on Fallout 3s game engine, but Fallout 3 is more stable on PS3 than New Vegas.
I hate Sony, but New Vegas getting cherry picked here for instability is laughable when New Vegas is widely known as perhaps the least stable game published by Bethesda.
Compared to New Vegas, Starfield is a vastly better and more stable game on a technical level. Sure the writing isnt better, but the mechanical parts of the game are. In my experience, I couldn’t play New Vegas for 10 consecutive minutes without the game crashing. Repeatedly. New Vegas crashed more than Cyberpunk 2077 ever did. Meanwhile Starfield only ever crashed once. And thats all on PC.
I don’t play them but I am always happy when something happens and it pisses off Nintendo and Nintendo Fanboys/Fangirls.
I used to love Nintendo, but this isnt Iwata’s Nintendo anymore. Now they only care about money, which isnt a shock considering the CEO has a history in financial, but its still disappointing nonetheless.
The Forza franchise is split into two distinct subgenres (kinda like how Gran Turismo used to have two disks: Sim and Arcade):
Forza Motorsport is the realistic simulator. Tire temperatures affecting grip levels of simulation.
Forza Horizon is the arcade racer. It uses Motorsport as a basis for its basic driving physics, but values are tuned or ignored to maximize the arcade factor of driving.
Horizons driving model kinda feels like Need for Speed, games by Criterion, but less mobile oriented. Its also a little similar to Test Drive Unlimited 2, but the grip is a little lowered to make drifting easier in Forza Horizon.
Its not like Mario Kart, Blur, Split Second, or Asphault. You could maybe try a demo to see if you like it, but you will probably have fun with it.
I feel exactly the opposite.
There are plenty of turn-based RPGs and JRPGs that I fell asleep playing that I probably wouldn’t have if I didn’t have to mostly stare at a static screen and menus most of the game. And dont even get me started on random battles.
Turn-based RPGs have repetitive combat loops to me. Same intro, same enemy lineup, same strategy, same music, same victory jingle. Over and over and over. It least in an action oriented game, I can choose where my character is, how I engage with combat, what terrain features I use, etc.
This is why I like Strategic Turn Based games like Fire Emblem and XCOM way more than standard turn based games.
But you still play as Snake. Sure, Venom Snake, not Solid Snake. But Raiden isnt Snake, hes just Raiden.
Perhaps Raiden is the reason that the MGSV protagonist is called Venom Snake and not something else.
There were a few MGS games that released between MGS2 and MGSV, and all of them IIRC had Snake as the protagonist.
Just to add some context here:
This rug pull was practically universally disliked by almost everyone that played MGS2 when it released. People that played MGS2 and liked that this happened are like, a super turbo minority of the people that played the game at the time. Only in recent years have people said they liked it.
The negative reception was so strong that Hideo Kojima himself in interviews would go on to say that the rug pull of Raiden was his biggest mistake with MGS2, and that he would never do something like that again.
Honestly, I think you should use them for anti-piracy DRM. Steam’s DRM is easy to crack, and so when we were thinking about how to make our game unpiratable, we just decided to use the Steam Achievements system like a save file. The game just loads the game state based on what achievements the player unlocked. You know, I never talk about this, but I used to work for Blizzard. I was the first second-generation Blizzard employee. But like, I never talk about it, so having worked there really taught me to think outside the box. So yeah, use achievements as DRM. Makes your game unpiratable.
People here really love pouring cold water on this, don’t they?
Starfield wasn’t my favorite, and I was disappointed with quite a few things about the game, but I still enjoy it. At least it isnt permanently tethered to a server that Bethesda can shut off at any moment. Its good to see them.not completely giving up on Starfield, but I do wish they had listened more to feedback and given the game a true 2.0 update that improves it more.
It is amazing to me that these prices keep going up and the companies making them are not going out of business. You and I both know that not enough people are buying these for them to survive if they aren’t at profit margins over 100%.
Being unable to emulate PS2/GameCube/Switch in this day and age at $150 USD is a deal breaker. I understand not doing Original Xbox, but the other three are very well developed on Android and Linux. There isn’t a reason that shouldn’t be possible other than “profit margins are too small if we make that possible at $150 USD.”
I mean, the little R36S can run up to N64/PS1/Dreamcast for $30 USD. The next generation up does not warrant a $120 USD price increase.
Yeah, but they actually provided a real service in exchange for that subscription.
Meanwhile Sony pays studios to NOT develop games for other platforms, which is HORRENDOUSLY anti-consumer, and Nintendo I dont even have to talk about.
Microsoft isnt the consumers best friend, but out of the big three they are the least bad.
Okay look, as much as I hate Nu-Marathon and NeoBungie, it was only a few in-game (most likely placeholder) textures in a beta build of the game. Anyone trying to claim the entire game was stolen has no idea what they are talking about. It’s wrong that it happened but in the bigger picture, it’s a very minor issue compared to other things with other games.
As a side note, and as an artist myself: Artists do not “own” an art style. Marathon’s art style is not stolen. Brutalism in graphic design existed since the late 1990s. Monet doesn’t “own” impressionism, Dali doesn’t “own” surrealism, Warhol doesn’t “own” pop-art. They never have. Anime and manga have been using that art style in their design and marketing for a very long time. Anime being a pretty big influence on Bungie during the time they were making old Marathon, Halo CE, and most obviously, Oni.
To be fair, in driving games, you dont really want to be changing a whole lot about the driving model once everyone agrees its perfect. Good driving mechanics are always good, and bad driving mechanics are always bad. The only thing worse than bad driving mechanics is when the previous game had perfectly fun driving physics and the next game changed it, making it objectively worse.
Which happened to Need for Speed. A fun arcade racer with predictable physics, Underground 2 had perfected the driving model Black Box had made. Slidey enough to make entering a drift feel easy and controllable, but still predictable enough to master over time. Then in Most Wanted they changed the driving model and added insane amounts of grip for some reason, making the driving model feel more like Mario Kart. Then every game after that one got progressively worse, until we land at the absolute bottom of the barrel games made by Criterion, who make all their driving models feel like they came from a mobile game with tilt controls. Like Unbound.
I dont believe a driving game with good and fun driving mechanics needs to really change anything other than the map, music, and adding cars for subsequent games.
Nintendo definitely learning the wrong lesson from this:
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The Right Lesson: Maybe we shouldn’t released an expensive console, with only a handful of new games and tons of repeat releases that are $70 (and suck) especially in a really bad global economy, and some of those games dont even have a real physical copy, and stop treating our fans like they are literally Hitler because they are passionate about our products.
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The Wrong Lesson: People must not want powerful hardware and physical games anymore.
Ok, well you obviously don’t understand how Denuvo actually works, so let me give you the simple TLDR version. Maybe if you understand how it works, you can see why it is so bad.
When a developer compiles their game with Denuvo, Denuvo adds itself to various functions of the game (set by the developer but has defaults as well). Usually this includes at least the main game loop which runs every frame, but also to other functions in the game as well. I cannot remember if Denuvo is added to every function of the game by default or just a lot of functions of the game, but it is added in multiple places and not just one. Anyway, by doing this, Denuvo basically partially encrypts the functions it adds itself to. Then, when the game is running in Denuvos virtual machine, it uses a magic number set during development and does a math calculation using a formula with parameters that include your HWID and your game license. It then compares the math calculation result to the magic number, and if those both match then everything is good and the game can keep running. Again, it does this in every function it is added, and since it is usually at least in the main game loop that runs every frame, you often can have Denuvo checking your license multiple times each frame, which is at the very least, wasteful. This is the only actual function that Denuvo accomplishes, by the way.
Denuvo ALSO adds a bunch of other unnecessary “dead end code” to these partially encrypted functions, which either loop on themselves or do nothing, in order to throw off cracking groups. This dead end code contains calculations that the CPU actually processes. They are not just there for looks, they do take up compute power even though functionally they do nothing important. Again, wasteful. The ticket can certainly expire between frames and cause issues.
When you said you watched videos comparing cracked games and non-cracked games and saw minimal gain, this is where I knew you didn’t really know how Denuvo works, because I wasn’t even talking about cracked Denuvo games.
Cracked Denuvo games still run Denuvo. Yes, thats right.
The way that Denuvo games get cracked is simple, but it is tedious and takes time. A hacker has to sift through the game code to find every Denuvo infected function. Then, they have to find where Denuvo checks the results of the magic number and the math calculation which is not always at the end of the function. The hacker then alters the check to always pass even if the numbers don’t match. Sometimes, they can catch the function before it does the math and it just instantly passes the check, but other times it has to be done later in the function depending on what the function does in the game and where it performs the check in the code. Regardless, this is why it generally results in a negligible performance gain: its still running Denuvo. Denuvo is just modified to always say “yes, the license is correct” every time. Two games which had a less negligible difference in performance when Denuvo was altered was Rime and Syberia 3.
I was talking about games that were officially updated to remove Denuvo by the developers. NieR Automata on PC, most notably, on the 21st of June, 2021, received an update that fixed performance issues with the game:
You can verify this on SteamDB, the change is U:24088901.
The performance gain was immediate, and everyone that had the game could tell the difference. Just for reference, when the game had Denuvo, the executable was ~100MB. After Denuvo was removed, the new filesize was just ~17MB. Thats ~83MB of bloated cancerware removed. Gone. And with it, the stuttering issues that plagued the game when it launched ~5 years prior.
This isnt a made up horror story. I never said Denuvo killed any children. This isnt made up for dramatic effect. This is how Denuvo works, and why I say it is cancerware. It only harms real paying consumers and should be removed for their benefit. Businesses that sell games are forgetting that the only thing that keeps them alive is being slightly more convenient than piracy.
If you don’t like it, I don’t know what else to tell you. This is the way it is.