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Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

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Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#81

Post by dns_snek »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #54
bdw5204 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is most likely due to Denuvo being harder to crack because it is a widely hated DRM. Pirates probably want to crack it on principle. I don't think most of the pirates actually care that much about whether people download their releases. They just want the credit within the scene of cracking something that's hard to crack or leaking something before street date. For-profit pirates would be an exception to this but…

> Denuvo is also an exception to piracy as a service problem being solved because it is widely hated even by non-pirates. Maybe in an abstract Reddit community kind of way. For paying end users I doubt Denuvo comes up much. It works behind the scenes and is pretty reliable.

It might not often come up by name, but most people can tell when a game is stuttering badly, or when their frame rate is low enough to be making their experience worse.

Denuvo has often been the cause of these issues and less technical players will usually direct their annoyance at the game publisher (which is ultimately the right place) but they won't know to attribute it more directly to Denuvo itself.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#83

Post by raxxorraxor »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #54
bdw5204 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is most likely due to Denuvo being harder to crack because it is a widely hated DRM. Pirates probably want to crack it on principle. I don't think most of the pirates actually care that much about whether people download their releases. They just want the credit within the scene of cracking something that's hard to crack or leaking something before street date. For-profit pirates would be an exception to this but…

> Denuvo is also an exception to piracy as a service problem being solved because it is widely hated even by non-pirates. Maybe in an abstract Reddit community kind of way. For paying end users I doubt Denuvo comes up much. It works behind the scenes and is pretty reliable.

I do care if a game uses it. It is not an essential factor, but it can very well lead me to skip a title if it comes to my attention. And that didn't only happen once or twice that I didn't make a purchase.

That some platforms more aggressively inform you about these facts is very appreciated. Same applies to some rootkit anti-cheat software.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#84

Post by iLoveOncall »

TeaDude wrote: post #68
iLoveOncall wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are already many games that are not playable because servers used for DRM were turned off I'll need a source for that.

Just off the top of my head, Ross Scott on youtube (AccursedFarms) has plenty of videos on the subject. A few of them are tucked away in reviews but he now has a dedicated "dead game news" series. These may not be games you'd want to play but the important message is that it's concerning that the biggest publishers (Ubisoft, EA etc.) can release stuff that will randomly die at some point in the future for no good rea…

You're talking about games that were online-only where the servers have been shutdown. This is not at all what the comment I'm responding to is about, which is games that rely on a DRM that connects to the internet to validate your installation, meaning that even full solo, fully offline games would stop working.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#85

Post by badsectoracula »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #79
smcl wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shader compilation is well known though, and anyone halfway serious about benchmarking these things (like Digital Foundry) factor this in and control for it

Yes, and anyone halfway serious including DF usually don't find Denuvo having any noticeable effect on performance

DF's claims isn't that it doesn't have any noticeable effect in performance (in fact in a recent video[0] they claim the opposite when Denuvo was introduced to Assassin's Creed Mirage after reviews were done - it can affect performance and thus because of that introducing it after the fact invalidated the CPU performance metrics reviewers had done) but - at least in the cases i remember - they cannot tell if the issues were due to Denuvo or not.

Note though that in a case where they could test both versions, they did find Denuvo to both have lesser performance and affect frame pacing[1] (though that is for a 2yo game, things might be better more recently).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LB1lRC4II4

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXZGCwAJpbM

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#86

Post by 63stack »

gambiting wrote: post #58
mavamaarten wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were some cases where there was a noticeable impact, there's quite some benchmarks out there that show a clear difference in FPS and frametimes. But it always seemed like a borked implementation to me, rather than a problem with the product itself.

All I'm saying is that at ubisoft this kind of issue was treated very seriously, not least because if we found out Denuvo was making our game look poor it would put the entire business relationship in jeopardy. We've devoted significant engineering resources on our end to investigate these reports(and yes, we have seen the benchmarks people have done), and no one was able to reproduce this with Denuvo enabled and Den…

I think the skepticism towards internal testing is because Ubisoft is known to often release broken games that need to be patched up after release. I can't fault people for not trusting them to do internal evaluations if the public releases are in such state.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#87

Post by metalcrow »

jsheard wrote: post #31
metalcrow wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense, but how are these paths encrypted? If it's at runtime, you should be able to just not encrypt them. If it's at install time, do they generate a custom encrypted exe just for you per-download?

It's all done ahead of time when the game is packaged by the developer. The executable you download contains every encrypted path that might be executed, but the authentication handshake only gives you the keys for a subset of those.

Ohhh, gotcha! How do they prevent replay attacks? Assuming you were only interested in cracking the game on your specific hardware, could you not just record the decryption key you get and use that offline? Then in theory you could just enumerate every hardware combo and aquire all the keys.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#88

Post by no_time »

gambiting wrote: post #46
redder23 wrote: post #25

The so-called "rumors" that Denuvo kills performance are not rumors. It's just not true ANYMORE. Older versions impacted performance heavily, but later on the performance impact became negligible.

I used to work at Ubisoft during the whole controversy about Denuvo killing performance in one of the recent Assassins Creeds - all I can say is we've done extensive investigation into this internally, as well as worked with Denuvo to assess these claims and they were just not true, but of course the court of public opinion has spoken so nothing we did or said could have changed it at that point.

Lol I used to wonder if the opposite is actually true. The current flavor of Denuvo cracks need to detour so many CPUID checks and winapi calls while also having most of the virtualization and obfuscation intact I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up costing more performance then just having the original protection intact.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#89

Post by orangeboats »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #64
p0w3n3d wrote: post #63

There are already many games that are not playable because servers used for DRM were turned off. In this matter I support cracking such "play only online" DRMs, because when I pay for a game I want to play it even after a few years, and maybe even especially after a few years

> There are already many games that are not playable because servers used for DRM were turned off I'll need a source for that.

Remember Games for Windows Live? Pretty sure the original version of GTA4 is no longer playable without cracking it due to GFWL being shut down.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#90

Post by ryathal »

badsectoracula wrote: post #59
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Denuvo is also an exception to piracy as a service problem being solved because it is widely hated even by non-pirates. Maybe in an abstract Reddit community kind of way. For paying end users I doubt Denuvo comes up much. It works behind the scenes and is pretty reliable.

I am a paying user and i actively avoid games with Denuvo - there is even a curator on Steam that marks games that use Denuvo, which is helpful for doing exactly that. The reason is simple: i want to have access to the games i bought regardless of Steam and when i buy a game there i also make a separate offline copy for my own archival. Denuvo - or any DRM really - makes that impossible. Fortunately most games (like…

Steam also displays a notice on games that use Denuvo and other similar 3rd party DRM libraries. It's not super prominent, but it's better than nothing.
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