History repeats itself. Bethesda might have gone too far when they approved of the first update of DOOM Eternal.

This game launched nearly two months ago on PC, complete with Denuvo. However, the devs have left (or did they intentionally put?) a DRM-free .exe file in the game’s folders to offer smoother, more stable gameplay that doesn’t have the id Tech 7-using game constantly „calling home.” Bethesda has quickly responded by removing this backdoor, and now, here’s the first big update for DOOM Eternal. „Empowered Demons are now online! When a player is killed in the single-player campaign, the demon that felled them is beefed up and transported to another player’s game to fight again! Take out an Empowered Demon and you’ll not only be rewarded with tons of health and ammo but also bonus XP to progress in-game events! Toggle Empowered Demons ON/OFF in the Game tab of the Main Menu Options,” Bethesda says. It also brings Echelon Leveling, which is the same thing as the prestige ranks in Call of Duty. You can get new cosmetics via Precious Metals, a new event.

That’s not the problem. This is the issue: „Added Denuvo Anti-Cheat software required for playing BATTLEMODE on PC. Denuvo Anti-Cheat uses a kernel-mode driver. [The] use of the kernel-mode driver starts when the game launches and stops when the game stops for any reason. Denuvo Anti-Cheat does not take screenshots, scan your file system, or stream shellcode from the internet. Denuvo Anti-Cheat (shortened to DAC onwards) can be uninstalled at any time through the “Add or remove programs” dialogue.” Now, this kernel-mode driver gains Ring 0 access to your operating system. It could cause your OS a lot of problems if some vulnerability is found in DAC. A similar issue surfaced when Riot added a similar driver to Valorant, and it was active all the time, unlike DAC.

What files could it leave behind if you uninstall this driver? About 1.5 decades ago, Starforce, another DRM caused similar issues, and it even complained if you had two optical drives in your PC, or if you had a virtual optical drive to read images of CDs/DVDs (iso or mdf/mds files), such as Daemon Tools.

If you look at the Steam reviews, you’ll see that the reviews have gone massively down in the past three days with nearly two thousand negative reviews. id Software’s game doesn’t fare better on the forums or Reddit either.

Going too far with Irdeto’s DRM and defending against cheaters (they are behind both Denuvo Anti-Tamper and DAC) resulted in pirates having a better experience again – those who’d only care about the single-player campaign would have no issues with the DRM, and they’d also see better performance. No wonder the players are angry about DAC.

Source: WCCFTech

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