Update: 15 hours after Gotham Knights' first major patch removed Denuvo from its executable, a small follow-up patch added it back. What many players celebrated as a positive move was, apparently, an accident.
On Wednesday, Gotham Knights' patch reduced the filesize of its executable by 327.10 megabytes, as captured by SteamDB, and players on Reddit noted that Denuvo was gone. That size is in keeping with Denuvo's anti-piracy DRM, which often adds several hundred megabytes to a game's .exe. Half a day later, another update added 315.6 megabytes back to the exe—not quite an identical amount, but again in keeping with Denuvo's usual .exe bloat. Denuvo is still listed on Gotham Knights' Steam page.
As Redditors pointed out, the change is probably too little, too late. "It's in deep oceans now baby," wrote one poster on the r/PiratedGames subreddit. We've reached out to Warner Bros. for comment on Gotham Knights' use of Denuvo and will update if we receive a reply.
Original story below.
Gotham Knights has arrived with, well, a bit of a whimper. The spinoff of the Arkham series, which casts you as four of Batman's sidekicks in the aftermath of the Dark Knight's apparent demise, is just generally underwhelming, but that certainly wasn't helped by a bunch of ongoing performance issues on PC.
The first patch for the game has arrived, which does not address these, but makes a bunch of tweaks and for reasons unknown removes Denuvo, the anti-piracy tech beloved of gamers everywhere. This seems odd but is something we've seen before with other titles, which launch running Denuvo (or one of the equivalents) then gets rid of it once that initial sales period has passed.
Other fixes include graphical glitches, control issues, and rather amazingly "Invincible enemies playing a 'meditating' animation will no longer appear in crimes." I mean, I'd have loved to have seen that: might've improved the experience.
The full patch notes are below:
- Invincible enemies playing a “meditating” animation will no longer appear in crimes.
- Various UI issue fixes.
- Fixed issues caused by graphical settings not being applied properly.
- Various localization fixes.
- Fixed various Keyboard/Mouse specific input issues.
- Co-op: Fixed an issue that was preventing being able to join friends through invites.
- Stability: Various crash fixes throughout the title, most notably during the S.T.A.R. Labs “free the scientists” fight and the Harley Quinn Hospital Boss Fight.
- Fixed an AMD specific crash related to shadows.
- Known Issues: There may be some compatibility issues with Nvidia Ansel that we are still investigating for this patch.
In regards to the performance issues, the official account says only that "The team is hard at work on a larger Patch to improve performance overall and give you the best possible experience."
There's more to come from Gotham Knights, with the big promise being the arrival of four player co-op at some point. Whether that's capable of saving this version of Gotham is a cliffhanger that we can probably already guess at the answer to.
