Doom Eternal reviewed well when it released back in March and while its recent big update brought forth a few requested features, it also added in one that players didn’t want: Denuvo Anti-Cheat. It has stirred up the PC community, stoking theories of it having spyware or tanking the game’s performance. Id has heard the complaints and will be removing Doom Eternal Denuvo Anti-Cheat in the game’s next update.
Similar to his letter about the game’s former composer Mick Gordon, Executive Producer Marty Stratton took to Reddit to break the news. In it, he spoke why the team is removing the software.
“Despite our best intentions, feedback from players has made it clear that we must re-evaluate our approach to anti-cheat integration,” he wrote. “With that, we will be removing the anti-cheat technology from the game in our next PC update.”
He cited campaign players that were roped into the situation as cheating isn’t quite so impactful during offline play. Any solutions id comes up with, according to Stratton, will have to better align “with player expectations around clear initiatives,” meaning the developer will consider where to implement future anti-cheat measures so it doesn’t negatively impact players “cheating” outside of Battlemode.
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Stratton was also clear in that including Denuvo Anti-Cheat wasn’t a decision that came down from Bethesda, calling it “simply untrue.” He then explained that the recent performance issues also weren’t because of anti-cheat software, but are instead “based on a code change we made around VRAM allocation.” The next update will also revert this back to launch-era performance. He did not give a specific date for this PC-specific update, but did state it would be out “within a week.”
Hopefully, id find a way to make the most amount of people happy. Cheating in multiplayer is quite annoying, but not nearly as much in single-player modes. Id Software Co-Founder John Carmack seems to agree.
