Rage 2 players are experiencing some issues on PC, including crashes and frame rate issues. The problems appear to be caused by Denuvo anti-tamper tech.
It seems that Rage 2 is using Denuvo anti-tamper tech to try to keep pirates at bay. Unfortunately, this appears to be affecting the performance of the game on PC. Some players are dealing with crashes and other issues like long load times and FPS slowdown. To make matters worse, according to a report from DSOG, Denuvo doesn’t appear to be mentioned anywhere in the games EULA.
As such, we went ahead and used a HEX Editor and found some similar calls between the RAGE 2, Total War THREE KINGDOMS and Just Cause 4 executable files. Therefore, I think it’s safe to say that, despite the game’s EULA not including it, RAGE 2 does in fact use the Denuvo anti-tamper tech.
It’s not just Denuvo that Bethesda has snuck into the mix either. Twenty-four hours before the game released they revealed that users would need to link the game to their Bethesda accounts to get their pre-order bonuses. This wasn’t mentioned in any of the promotional material in the run-up to release, and some people who bought the game are more than a little miffed about it.
With DLC content being held behind another account, players rightfully feel that things they already purchased are being withheld from them. Even now, Bethesda’s website makes no mention of the need for a Bethesda account to access the pre-order bonuses.
Whether or not this all blows up into a major story remains to be seen, but Bethesda has struggled to find smooth ways to engage with their customers of late. The Fallout 76 release and several subsequent PR nightmares that followed would make you think that they would want the launch of Rage 2 to go as smoothly as possible. If they were not looking for any backlash around this game, sneaking Denuvo into the mix, and forcing people to sign up to a Bethesda account, probably were not the right moves to make.
