Doom Eternal recently released Update 1, which added the controversial Denuvo Anti-Cheat system to the game. The new anti-cheat system works in the Kernel mode, which can give complete access to the player’s PC. Obviously, this didn’t sit well with the fans. The game received massive backlash from its community, and even became the latest victim of review bombing. Eternal received over 6600+ negative reviews on Steam, almost all of them complaining about the Denuvo Anti-Cheat.
Executive Producer of Doom Eternal, Marty Stratton, came to Reddit and told the fans that they will be removing the new anti-cheat in the next update. “Despite our best intentions, feedback from players has made it clear that we must re-evaluate our approach to anti-cheat integration. With that, we will be removing the anti-cheat technology from the game in our next PC update.” The post reads. “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.”
A good anti-cheat system is a difficult thing to achieve. The software needs to be effective by finding and banning cheaters that are ruining the game. However, it should also not be too invasive and get access to almost everything. Fans will definitely appreciate Id's decision to remove the Denuvo Anti-Cheat.
Many players also speculated that the Denuvo Anti-Cheat notably reduced the game’s performance. However, Stratton clarified this as well. He said that the reduced performance is due to the new code around VRAM allocation. The next update will revert these changes as well. It means that your game will now perform as well as it did during launch.
Stratton also clarified that the decision to add Denuvo Anti-Cheat was solely theirs, and the online speculation that their parent company, Bethesda, forced them to add the anti-cheat is simply untrue.
I hope that Id Software decides to remove the Denuvo DRM protection as well. It is one more additional piece of software that the game doesn’t need. Denuvo DRM is used to protect the game from piracy, but Eternal was already ‘cracked’ a couple of months ago, so there is no purpose for DRM anymore. Doom (2016) also came with Denuvo DRM protection, but it was completely removed after a couple of months.
So what do you think? Will you be playing Doom Eternal now? Did you uninstall the game when the new anti-cheat system was released? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
