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Doom Eternal to be purged of controversial anti-cheat softwareLeaving none in its place
Leaving none in its place
As you may or may not have noticed, there is a bit of a hoo-ha going down about kernel-level anti-cheat software. This is software that peeps at what Windows is up to using administrator privileges, which some people are understandably unhappy about. Happily, then,Doom Eternaldevelopers Id Software are going to rid their game of Denuvo Anti-Cheat. The purge will come in an update planned for “within a week”. They only added Denuvo-Anti-Cheat last week.
Unhappily, that also means going back to no anti-cheat software at all for the time being.
Id make no mention of an immediate replacement. Instead, executive producer Marty Strattonsays:
“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.”
You’d think turning anti-cheat software off for campaign-only players would be a no-brainer, but this seems to be wrapped up in talk about the upcoming “Invasion” mode. That’s going to smush multiplayer into the campaign, and it sounds neat - but Id’s hesitance still doesn’t make sense to me. I’d rather they gave solo-players a button that turned off the thing they don’t care about.
The post also spells out their reasoning for introducing Denuvo-Anti-Cheat in the first place, which boils down to ‘it works’ while meeting their “standards for security and privacy”. It’s worth noting that Denuvo-Anti-Cheat is different to Denuvo-Anti-Tamper, and thus attached to different concerns about its impact on performance. I’ll leave Alice toexplain that whole mess.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
Stratton’s post also clarifies that the performance issues some people have faced since Update 1 had nothing to do with anti-cheat. Those were actually “based on a code change [they] made around VRAM allocation”, which will be reverted with the next update. They’ve fixed other crash-causing bugs, too, which were to do with memory-leaks and customisable skins.
