UPDATE: 7/15: Following growing evidence that DRM is the most likely cause of stuttering in the PC version of Resident Evil Village, Capcom has responded. Speaking to Eurogamer, a spokesperson confirmed, “The team are working on a patch to address PC performance issues, it should be available soon – we’ll have more details shortly.”
In the past, Resident Evil game patches have simply removed the DRM once the initial new game sales period is over. It’s unclear is Capcom intends to keep the DRM but implement some performance tweaks to stop the stuttering, remove the DRM completely, or both. Hopefully it won’t be long before we find out and PC gamers can start enjoying the game as it was meant to be played.
Original Story 7/12:In what look to be another example of how digital-rights management (DRM) negatively impacts paying customers, DRM seems to be causing the annoying stuttering PC gamers are experiencing in Resident Evil Village.
Since launch, owners of the game on PC have been complaining of major stuttering problems whenever you kill an enemy. The typical response to this complaint has been “wait for the patch.” However, as DSOG reports, game cracking team EMPRESS didn’t wait for the patch and instead cracked the game and removed the DRM. In so doing, the stuttering disappeared, suggesting the two are linked.
Capcom opted to use a combination of its own anti-tamper V3 and Denuvo V11 to protect the game on PC. DSOG played the pirated version of the game for over two hours to confirm the stuttering is gone, with the video above confirming the experience of playing this DRM-free version.
The good news is, Capcom can clearly fix the stuttering problems by simply removing the DRM, but until it does, PC gamers are just going to have endure it. Undoubtedly some will become frustrated enough to seek out a pirate copy instead, but in doing so they run the risk of downloading a copy with malware attached. Hopefully Capcom sorts this out quickly, especially now evidence of the cause of the stuttering is widely known. The publisher has used Denuvo DRM before and opted to remove it as part of a game update, so fingers-crossed it does the same for Village.
