RIME update removes DRM; Devs “do not believe” Denuvo at fault for all game issues

The RiME developers are making good on their promise to remove Denuvo anti-tamper software from the game in the occurrence that the game is cracked. The game was officially cracked yesterday, so the developers are replacing the current build of RiME with one that does not contain Denuvo – according to a Steam post.

The update should occur automatically.

In the same announcement that revealed RiME had been cracked, the hacker who did it stated that Denuvo's DRM was the reason behind the game's loading abilities being slowed, as well as the game's stuttering.

The developers addressed this in a blog post on their site, stating that they have diagnosed a number of issues that are linked to graphics cards:

"AMD RX five eighty cards appear to be having trouble in general, and our team is looking into what the cause might be. Additionally, the NVidia ten eighty cards are having problems with SSAA anti-aliasing. Switching to another option may help. We’ve also had users report that switching the VSync setting to Double Buffering significantly boosted performance, especially on nine hundred series NVidia cards."

In addition to that, the developers know how "sensitive" of a topic Denuvo and DRM are, but explained that they chose to use DRM because of how high piracy levels are in their game genre. The devs did admit to Denuvo contributing to some performance issues, but not as much as people say.

"The only thing that Denuvo is currently doing for us is checking to make certain that Steam’s (or Origin’s) DRM is still attached to the game. There is a small performance hit associated with this, but at this time we do not believe it is causing the problems that are currently being reported. We might be wrong. We’re monitoring the situation."

 Additionally, the first traditional patch for RiME is in the works and will address the VR initialization bug, and provide a fix to some specific instances of hardware-related crashes, as well as a number of other yet to be detailed issues.