Better performance for pirates: Crack removes stutters from Capcom PC game

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  Resident Evil 8: Village‘s retail PC version, as accessed from Steam, suffers from sporadic midcombat stutters, as the top-left “performance graph” indicates. This week’s cracked version has, at least in one independently verified testing scenario, solved this issue. [credit: Capcom ]

Over the weekend, the PC version of May 2021’s Resident Evil 8: Village was apparently cracked and uploaded to various piracy depositories. In sadly unsurprising news, as with at least a few other cracked PC games in recent years, this scene release came with a bonus that’s currently only available to freeloaders: improved performance.

The game’s cracked version, credited to the release group Empress, includes an “NFO” text file that cites two distinct antipiracy prevention measures: “Denuvo V11” and “Capcom Anti-Tamper V3.” While the NFO text includes its fair share of anti-Denuvo language, the Empress author’s technical breakdown of the crack says both systems working in concert are to blame:

All in-game shutters [sic] like the one from when you kill a zombie are fixed because Capcom DRM’s entry points are patched out so most of their functions are never executed anymore. This results in much smoother game experience. THIS IS PURE CANCER AND ANYONE WHO ACCEPTS THIS IS NOTHING BUT A PATHETIC GARBAGE HUMAN SLAVE!

The messaging continues with a key clarification: Capcom’s DRM was “fully obfuscated” in a Denuvo virtual machine, thus making the game “run even slower.”