Denuvo Anti-Cheat is a thing now, or at least it was a thing with Doom Eternal. After a pretty raucous announcement surrounding a recent patch, things have changed. Speaking about Denuvo Anti-Cheat, executive producer Marty Stratton had a few words to say via an update on Reddit today. He apologized to the fans and made it clear that the invasive DRM solution would be removed soon.
The original reason of protecting BATTLEMODE players from cheaters is still on the priority list, but the developer will likely go about the issue in a new way. id also wanted to protect the game from hackers now rather than later when they unveil the upcoming invasion game mode, a hybrid of singleplayer and multiplayer.
Players were rather angry about the inclusion of a kernel module for anti-cheat purposes. But according to the creators, it’s fine. “No monitoring or data collection happens outside of multiplayer matches,” Denuvo Anti-Cheat Product Owner Michail Greshishchev told Ars Technica.
And as anyone would be surprised by, the blame for Denuvo Anti-Cheat is entirely on id software. It turns out that according to Statton that Bethesda was not involved in the decision, and did not force Denuvo onto the game. Perhaps that could explain why it was so painlessly slated for removal. Normally publisher forcing decisions is hard to fight back against. Players were not too happy to see Denuvo Anti-Cheat crop up in Doom Eternal, review-bombing the game right away on Steam.
“Despite our best intentions, feedback from players has made it clear that we must re-evaluate our approach to anti-cheat integration,” said the producer. Going further, he also revealed a bit more behind the thinking that the developer has had to do post-backlash in designing a more accommodating and less irritating anti-cheat system.
“As we examine any future of anti-cheat in DOOM Eternal, at a minimum we must consider giving campaign-only players the ability to play without anti-cheat software installed, as well as ensure the overall timing of any anti-cheat integration better aligns with player expectations around clear initiatives—like ranked or competitive play—where demand for anti-cheat is far greater.”
“Through our investigation, we discovered and have fixed several crashes in our code related to customizable skins. We were also able to identify and fix a number of other memory-related crashes that should improve overall stability for players. All of these fixes will be in our next PC update,” they also wrote in the update.
