'Assassin's Creed Origins' News: Pirates Finally Crack Game After Three Months

By Kevin Reyes, Christian Post Contributor Tuesday, February 06, 2018

The Assassins are at war once again, but this time, it is not from the Templars but rather from a group of Italian pirates that finally managed to crack all the layers and layers of digital rights management (DRM) that Ubisoft placed on "Assassin's Creed Origins" three months after release.

Announced on the Crack Watch subreddit, a piracy news subreddit, Italian group CFY has managed to crack the newest entry in Ubisoft's long-running "Assassin's Creed" series. What is truly impressive (or perhaps worrying depending on who is being asked) is that "Assassin's Creed Origins" did not just have one, nor two, but three layers of DRM with Denuvo, VMProtect, and Uplay's own native DRM all being present in the game.

Denuvo and other forms of DRM are intended to protect the game from pirates and people who illegally downloaded the game. However, despite having a strong reputation when it first came out, Denuvo has become much easier to break by hackers with the recently released "Shadow of War" having been cracked in less than 24 hours from its release.

DRM has also been a controversial issue even to people who legitimately own their games. Several reports have been made that Denuvo and other forms of DRM can actually hinder how well a game runs because they are running in the background and using up resources.

There have been also cases of some developers removing Denuvo from their games after it was cracked by hackers, so it will be interesting to see if Ubisoft will follow that trend and take out all their layers of DRM now that the game has been cracked, albeit after a very long time.

While it was a good effort from Ubisoft and perhaps the longest time it has taken a piracy group to crack a game, it seemed like it was inevitable that hackers would find a way. With the increasing unreliability of DRM, even when there are three layers stacked on top of each other, it will be interesting to see if developers continue to implement these systems.