The most recent patch for BioWare’s Mass Effect: Andromeda has already been released and was pushed live to the game with all of the changes intact that the patch notes promised, but when users dug through the updated game’s files, they found a change that wasn’t documented. With the latest patch, BioWare has removed the DRM known as Denuvo from the game.
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First reported by Dark Side of Gaming, the site noted that it could’ve been a mistake that the anti-tampering safeguard had been removed from the game, noting that there have been cases of Denuvo being removed from games during one patch only to be reinstated in a later one. However, it seems likely that Mass Effect: Andromeda has taken out the DRM for good now, especially considering the game’s situation with Denuvo when the game was first released.
When Mass Effect: Andromeda was first available, it’s version of Denuvo was outdated and was subsequently cracked in no time at all by users. A patch that came later for the game shipped an updated version of the DRM to the game, but it came a bit too late as the initial version had already been cracked and released to players online.
A plan to remove Denuvo from the game around this time could’ve been a plan all along — other games in the past have gone to market with the DRM in place only to be removed at a later date, a practice that some believe is a way of ensuring official copies of the game get sold during the initial release before the game is cracked and pirated.
The majority of players probably won’t be too troubled by the removal of the anti-piracy mechanism anyway, and some might even be happy to notice a slight increase in their in-game performance. DRMs like Denuvo have been blasted in the past for negatively impacting the performance of some games as users claim that the service slows down games. One of the more popular recent cases involved the game known as Rime where devs made a bet that if players could crack the DRM that they’d remove it, a claim that was quickly fulfilled when players cracked it in no time.
