The Italian hacking group CPY announced today it finally cracked Assassin’s Creed Origins meaning people with pirated versions of the game will now be able to bypass its DRM protections.
The announcement from CPY cropped up on the CrackWatch subreddit earlier today where commenters have been speculating for months about when and if the game would ever have its DRM cracked.
This was after the initial controversy surrounding Ubisoft’s decision to include so many layers of anti-piracy protection due to complaints from regular PC players that the combination of Denuvo 4.8, VMProtect, and Ubsisoft’s standard Uplay security were an usual drain on their system’s resources.
Most new games get cracked by hacker groups within weeks or even days of release at this point. Early last year, a slew of games had workarounds for their Denuvo anti-piracy protection put out in record time, starting with Resident Evil 7.
Assassin’s Creed Origins managed to keep its various layers of protection intact for much longer, however, due in part to a newer version of Denuvo than what past games were using.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/11/ubisoft-denies-assassins-creed-origins-drm-is-slamming-your-cpu/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/w45hq5sathyeci35awbu.jpg” title=”Ubisoft Denies Assassin’s Creed Origin’s DRM Is Slamming Your CPU” excerpt=”Since the release of Assassin’s Creed Origins on PC, some users have been complaining that the game’s CPU usage has been immense, sometimes pushing 90-100 per cent. That’s not normal, and it’s led to accusations that the game’s new DRM is the culprit.”]
CPY, which sometimes cracks games under the name CONSPIR4CY, has been responsible for cracking many of the biggest games over the last few years including Doom, Inside, and Resident Evil 7. The roll out of Denuvo 4.8, however, seemed to have stop it and other groups in their tracks. Middle-earth: Shadow of War, South Park: The Fractured but Whole, FIFA 18 all used an older version of Denuvo and were each cracked within a day of release.
It wasn’t until late January that version 4.8 was first cracked with Sonic Forces, but Assassin’s Creed Origins still presented unique challenges due to the added VRProtect and Uplay protections.
With piraters now able to bypass the game’s protections, it’s unclear whether Ubisoft will keep all of the anti-tampering tech in place. Certain publishers have patched their games after they have been cracked to remove Denuvo, which is what happened with Doom and Inside.
In Doom‘s case, a spokesperson for Denuvo told Kotaku at the time that the reason it was removed was because it had already accomplished the main goal of protecting the game during its initial sales window. At three months, Assassin’s Creed Origins‘ anti-piracy protections accomplished something similar. The company hasn’t been one to remove Denuvo after the fact in the past, however. Kotaku has reached out to both Ubisoft and Denuvo for comment on the matter.
Last month Denuvo was purchased by the digital security company Irdeto and has already released a version 5.0 of its software. Dragon Ball FighterZ, released January 26, is the most recent game to use this version and remains uncracked.
Comments
41 responses to “After Three Months, Pirates Say They Have Finally Cracked Assassin’s Creed Origins ”
Seriously pirates just buy the game. Ubisoft would love to not have to spend additional money on DRM and legit players would love to have a product that is less taxing on their hardware.
The game can be bought for less than 60 bucks now, regardless of platform and in a few months it will be 40 or less. This is Australian pricing too.
Stop being so tight!!!
It’s a game for them now. How to beat the protection. It’s not about winning. It’s about sending a message…
What’s the message?
DRM is shit? If I remember correctly Ubisoft challenged them to do it by bragging about how it’s still uncracked.
If people didn’t pirate we wouldn’t need DRM.
Not necessarily. It’s something that would have come about regardless in my opinion. Especially with Ubisoft.
True, and there is nothing wrong with protecting their property.
…except when the protection measures implemented harm the hardware of the paying customers ….right?
And if game companies created decent games, they wouldn’t need DRM. Witcher 3 (and other games on GOG) is a good example.
It’s a bad example. Denuvo etc are used to protect new games. Games like witcher came out on gog quite some time after release when the risk of profit loss from pirating is a lot lower.
Witcher 3 was released on GOG at the same time it was released on Steam on game’s initial release date 19 May 2015. So stop spread misinformation as SteelPanther is right if AAA publishers put work into their games like CD Projekt Red instead of MT’s and DLC then they’d sell 1.5 million copies its first week instead of blaming sales on the non existent myth of piracy being the cause.
Witcher 3 was released on GOG and Steam simultaneously on May 19? States on both GOG and Steam that May 18/19 (18 for the US) were the release dates.
Witcher 3, is basically a great example. As is Witcher 2, which saw a physical release not reliant upon Steam or any digital download service. The Witcher series has always been a strong example of what he was talking about.
can confirm with sholva81
May 19, 2015 was gog version
May 18, 2015 was steam version
(might be timezones but who knows for a day later i might also be wrong)
I was also on twitch a lot on gog channels and was a mod at one point for a time being (not actually working for company)
which got pushed back 2 times
third quarter 2014 (first release date)
Feb. 24, 2015
May 19, 2015
i believe there was stuff going on when witcher 3 was in the making as well
This is nonsense for a multitude of reasons.
1. It’s essentially victim blaming. A company deserves to be pirated if their work isn’t good enough.
2. It’s suggesting that good games shouldn’t or won’t be pirated but bad games should/will. This is the opposite of how piracy tends to work.
3. You assume that pirates are more concerned with the quality of the game than the whole not-paying-anything factor, and that they’d otherwise reward “good games” and not pirate them.
4. There is no objective criteria for what makes a good game. I didn’t even like Witcher 3, but you think it’s a good game.
5. You can’t decide if a game is good until you played it.
6. More people played Witcher 3 than the previous iterations, which means a ton of people who bought it and who pirated it both had no idea whether it would be good besides word of mouth and reviews.
7. The suggestion that better-quality games would prevent future piracy or reduce it is ridiculous. GTAV is one of the most pirated games, and also one of the best reviewed.
Sorry, but you have misinterpreted my message on almost every level. I wasn’t stating that companies deserve to have games pirated, nor was I stating that good games won’t be pirated. My point is that CD Projekt Red spent more effort trying to make a good game and giving a good service to their customers instead of worrying about people pirating the game. There probably was still a lot of pirating of their game – but they don’t want to inconvenience their actual customers by adding annoying DRM (and they have often stated that). Why should a pirate have a better game experience than a customer?
“Sorry, but you have misinterpreted my message on almost every level.”
There is only one level. All you mean is I misinterpreted everything you said. The truth, however, is you expressed yourself in an ignorant way, not thinking through the implications of your own words.
“I wasn’t stating that companies deserve to have games pirated, nor was I stating that good games won’t be pirated.”
Then you should have expressed yourself better.
“CD Projekt Red spent more effort trying to make a good game and giving a good service to their customers instead of worrying about people pirating the game.”
Effort doesn’t automatically make a game good. Look at The Last Guardian. Also, those two efforts are not mutually exclusive. Look at Just Cause 3 or Metal Gear Solid V.
“There probably was still a lot of pirating of their game – but they don’t want to inconvenience their actual customers by adding annoying DRM (and they have often stated that).”
This is irrelevant to your original argument.
“Why should a pirate have a better game experience than a customer?”
The DRM is still in the pirated game. Cracking the DRM doesn’t remove it.
If companies didn’t bloat out their software with DRM, we wouldn’t need pirates to render it a useless appendage.
Double-edged sword. Ubisoft is known to be awful with this stuff.
Some people just want to see the world burn.
They made DRM to stop the pirates. Now there are pirates dedicated to breaking DRM, just to prove they can.
I actually agree with your point.
However, I don’t think you realise that for those who are cracking games, software, etc, a big part of why is simply to see if they can… If it wasn’t they simply wouldn’t spend months trying. If you think the people who are doing the work to crack this stuff can’t afford to buy the games, you’re just kidding yourself.
No matter what you make… Someone is always going want to break it down for no other reason than simply to see if they can.
On top of this… When you have DRM developers toting how effective their work is, it’s basically asking people to try to break their shit.
At the end of the day though DRM is useless for the consumer. People who are pirating games are not suddenly just going to start buying them. Meanwhile legit customers are left out with poor performance. DRM merely protects those releasing a rubbish game from returns on the PC platform. I couldn’t tell you the amount of games I’ve pirated to play 1-2 hours and stop because it was clearly just a broken game or misrepresented. Why should I have to pay 80 bucks for garbage. True story pirated Witcher 2 and Fallout 3 back in the day, and purchased them the following day.
While I don’t agree with stealing from the a gaming company (OK, maybe EA, lol), Denuvo is proven to slow down PCs with thousands of extra calls and checks to make sure the game is legit while playing. It’s what makes it so hard to crack (Or that’s what the company says). So, it’s less about getting the game for free and more of a “Stick it to the man, free our CPUs”
This game is an unusual one in that a legally purchased PC copy would give a worse gameplay experience because of the DRM causing framerate drops and other performance issues.
It’s one thing for Ubi to say we’re doing this to protect ourselves from pirates. OK I get that. However they are providing customers who purchased the game for PC with a piss poor excuse vs the console versions.
Please mate your in the minority. Don’t you know from ubisoft statistics that 90% of PC users pirate video games.
Haven’t played this is a few months now. But just wondering where the comments section over at gizmodo.com.au has gone???
Now that it’s been cracked it’ll be interesting to see whether the DRM is actually responsible for maxing your CPU.
With doom 2016 myself and others report no change.
Doom didn’t have the vmprotect layer though, right?
No it had denovu
Right, but the claim is that denuvo and vmprotect together cause a performance hit.
And the author singles out doom and other denuvo only games as well as creed which has both. So commenting on the article.
You didn’t reply to the author though, you replied to someone who was wondering about the DRM effect in AC Origins. Since Doom didn’t have vmprotect it’s not really a helpful comparison to what neurotic was talking about.
Unfortunately the DRM is still embedded in the game. It’s not so much that they have removed it altogether, that they have simply bypassed the ‘checks’ that would otherwise stop the game from working (therefor performance should be mostly identical between the legitimate copy and pirated version). I’m pretty sure Ubisoft won’t ever get rid of the multiple layers of DRM because I have a feeling that it does indeed affect performance, and Ubisoft would never want that kind of information made public because it limits them to use it again in the future.
I buy all my games but I can definitely see why young people would pirate. It’s hard enough for them to make enough cash to cover rent and the bare necessities let alone splurge on entertainment.
Second to that is that shareware and demos are pretty much non-existent now so piracy is the only way to find out if it’s worth dropping $60-80 on a game when you’ve got limited funds.
Sick of hearing about this peasantry. Not impressed someone is a big man and can crack a game so assholes can pirate it.
You know, not everyone who pirates does it to hurt the developer/publisher.. growing up I used to pirate because my parents wouldn’t buy me the game, or I was genuinely too poor.
I pirated Darkwoods because I was on the fence about it. After playing it, I purchased a legitimate copy.
Well she did say peasants.
Well shes right, the peasants are the most likely to pirate a game as they can’t afford it. Dirty thriving peasants! Never trust em! they’re after all the ubisoft gold I tells ya. They’re literally stealing the fun right out from the company.
How can they make good games with peasants stealing all the fun! This is the real reason why Uplay eats your save files, because it occasionally runs out of fun!
People pirate because their chances of getting caught are low. Then try to juostfy their actions with excuses that in their mind make them a good guy.
If this were true, the effect of easily accessible distribution and reasonable pricing wouldn’t be nearly as pronounced as it is. Broadly speaking, piracy is a multilayered issue that’s centred around accessibility, not absence of culpability. Increasing accessibility significantly reduces piracy, while increasing enforcement doesn’t.
With steam, gog, psn, Xbox live etc etc. I don’t believe accessibility for a second.
So they cracked AC because they couldnt get it anywhere legitimately?
Accessibility isn’t just multiple distribution points, it’s how easily someone can access the game. Both price and intrusive DRM are accessibility factors.
People were activating their original copy with others over teamspeeak previously for like $1.
Too late to damage developers now! they have made huge profits already. I preordered and no regrets, it was a very enjoyable experience.
Why are there so many people kissing Ubisoft’s a$$, stop it….JUST..stop
I own two copies of assasins creed 2
I play the pirated cracked version becuase it isnt full of Uplay and DRM bullshit
The pirated expereince is BETTER than the version i purchased
Ubisoft is scum, they fill games with annoying inconvenient drm that breaks a hell of a lot of their games every time the servers go down or disconnect for uplay
I have payed for assasins creed 2 so why the fuck is the pirated version a better experience for me the consumer?
And it really hasnt changed going forward, the cracked versions are invariably less shit than the paid for versions when it comes to ubisoft and its DRM