Five Days After Launch, Rime Gets Cracked And Now The Studio Has A Promise To Keep

Earlier this week, publisher Grey Box announced that it would drop Denuvo DRM from its recently launched adventure game Rime when the game got cracked. Now, that has happened, it seems--and faster than the studio expected.

In an open letter posted on Steam, producer Cody Bradley said the team acknowledges that this is a "very sensitive topic for gamers." The studio used Denuvo because it looked at the piracy rate of games similar to Rime "and it scared us."

"At the end of the day, our obligation as a publisher is to protect our development team’s intellectual property to the best of our ability. Right now, Denuvo is our only effective option," Bradley said.

All that Denuvo is doing currently is checking to ensure that Steam or Origin's own DRM is working, according to Bradley. The game suffers a "small performance hit" when this check happens, but it is not leading to other issues with the game. Or it might be.

"We might be wrong," Bradley said. "We're monitoring the situation."

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He went on to say that Grey Box anticipated Denuvo getting cracked within two weeks of launch, "maybe three at most." But it's now been cracked, according to Polygon, in just five days. That reportedly ties a record with Resident Evil 7 for the fastest Denuvo crack.

Now that Rime is cracked, fans will look to the developer to follow through on its promise and drop Denuvo. For his part, Bradley said, "We have no intentions of patching a new version of Denuvo in [when the game gets cracked]."

Also in the blog post, Bradley responded to some of the issues players are reporting, including performance problems. He mentioned that in the course of development, the studio did "several cycles" of compatibility testing on different hardware to see how the game holds up.

"While we try to be as thorough as possible, it's incredibly difficult for us to cover every permutation of motherboard, graphics card, RAM, processor, and hard drive out there," he said.

If you are encountering issues with Rime, you can visit this site--http://support.greybox.com--to speak with the game's support team. This team will then pore over the reports and seek out patterns that might exist so the developer can then patch the game as needed.

Some problems have already been diagnosed. In particular, AMD RX 580 cards are running into trouble in general, while Nvidia 1080s are encountering issues with SSAA anti-aliasing. As a temporary workaround, Bradley said people can try switching to a different option or switching the Vsync setting to double buffering (this is particularly helpful on 900-series Nvidia cards).

"We know this can be frustrating (we share in that frustration), but we're confident that with your assistance we can resolve these issues in the next few weeks," Bradley said.

GameSpot' Rime review scored the game a 6/10.

"Each world is enchanting in its own way, from the naturalistic peace of the first to the abstract doom of the last," reviewer Oscar Dayus said. "Its soundtrack is similarly beautiful, capable of evoking wonder, tension, and fear in equal measure. But when compared to its influences like Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Journey, it doesn't hold up too well. Consistent navigation problems, some frustrating puzzles, fiddly platforming, and severe frame rate dips make Rime feel like a well-dressed tribute act."