Some of you may have noticed that during live-streams and playthroughs of RiME on PC the game had a lot of stutter, slowdown during certain segments where the camera would swivel in large areas, and that there were frequent hiccups that hampered input latency and playability. Well, crackers finally cracked the Denuvo DRM for RiME and discovered that it was Denuvo causing all the performance issues on PC.

A post over on DSO Gaming quotes the crackers after they managed to infiltrate Tequila Works’ 3D adventure game. The crackers wrote…

“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 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 [Sniper Ghost Warrior 3], 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 f’ing MILLIONS of called “triggers”. Protection now calls about 10-30 triggers every second during actual gameplay, slowing game down. In previous games like [Sniper Ghost Warrior 3], Nier, Prey there were only about 1-2 “triggers” called every several minutes during gameplay, so do the math.”

Very informative.

Essentially all of these real-time triggers that Denuvo was sending off to “protect” the game was actually causing it to slow down greatly, since it was eating up memory that should have been used for the game, but was instead being used to store call functions and triggers from Denuvo, in addition to sending additional instructions to the CPU.

Overall the DRM did more harm than good since pirates can now play the cracked version of the game without having to worry about slowdown or performance hiccups.

In fact, the 7.36GB torrent floating around means that not only will pirates be able to download the game for free, but with the Denuvo crack they can experience a better playing, smoother experience than people who legitimately paid for the game.

The cracked version of RiME‘s exe is available in a 77.5MB download, which was uploaded to the usual sites hosting cracks. The crack also works for the Steam version of the game. So for those of you who did legitimately pay for a copy of the game, you can get the cracked version from Baldman, and it will help the performance issues that the game suffers from on PC.

Tequila Works had previously stated that if crackers managed to crack the DRM, they would release a Denuvo-free version of the game, saying…

“We are very committed to this, but also to the simple fact that nothing is infallible. That being said, if RIME is cracked we will release a Denuvo free version of RiME and update existing platforms.“

RiME is available right now for PC, PS4 and Xbox One, and it’s scheduled to release later in the year for the Nintendo Switch.

[Update: It looks like Tequila Works will have a DRM-free version of RiME made available soon enough.]

Our publisher promised 2 make RiME DRM free if it was cracked. We didn’t implement that protection in the 1st place & a promise is a promise

— Tequila Works (@tequilaworks) June 1, 2017