Resident Evil Village has proven to be one of the most popular game releases of 2021. PC players, however, felt like Capcom hadn't fully optimized Resident Evil Village for the platform. Several times throughout the horror game PC players would experience major stuttering and frame drops, regardless of their settings. Now PC gamers may know why, as a recently-released crack for Resident Evil Village that circumvents its DRM appears to have corrected all instances of stuttering.

A crack issued by piracy group EMPRESS issued this past week made a surprising claim in its Resident Evil Village release. The description promises that "all in-game shutters[sic]" have been fixed by its crack. Further, it specifically states that these stutters are a direct result of Capcom's DRM in Resident Evil Village. As such, when the DRM's functions are patched out, the stuttering doesn't occur. EMPRESS claims that using the crack ultimately results in a "much smoother game experience."

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Further reporting from DSO Gaming appears to verify EMPRESS' claims regarding its crack fixing Resident Evil Village's stuttering problems. DSO Gaming says that it played over two hours of Resident Evil Village with the crack installed. As a result, it experienced no stuttering was experienced the entire way through. That includes in instances where dramatic stuttering should occur regularly, like after killing enemies and throughout Castle Dumitrescu. The issue appears to have been Capcom's DRM the entire time.

EMPRESS pulls no punches in its description of Capcom's DRM. Without quoting the piracy group verbatim, its sentiment is that Capcom's DRM decisions are unacceptable and that gamers shouldn't support the company. Further, it accuses the DRM's creator, Denuvo, of trying to obfuscate how its DRM impacts Resident Evil Village's performance by using technology that makes it "run even slower."

It should be made abundantly clear that using a crack, like what EMPRESS has created, to play Resident Evil Village is illegal even if the player owns the game. Purchasing a game is effectively a license to play it as the developer/publisher intended. As such, there remains no legal way on PC to play without DRM and so no way to play without in-game performance issues. The only legal path would be to persuade Capcom to officially remove the DRM from the PC version of Resident Evil Village.

DRM impacting a game's performance on PC, particularly Denuvo's DRM, is not a rare event. An analysis from Extreme Tech reported that Denuvo hurt game performance in "nearly every" game it was included in. Many publishers do eventually remove performance-impacting DRM from their games eventually, but not before most gamers have already played through the game. In many cases, the DRM is left in, leading to issues like with Might and Magic 10, which is no longer fully playable after Ubisoft ended online support triggering the game's DRM to block progress.

Capcom has not issued a statement regarding Resident Evil Village's performance on PC, nor regarding the game's DRM.

Resident Evil Village is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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Source: DSO Gaming, Extreme Tech