Sonic Mania Plus may have brought back classic characters Ray and Mighty from the dead, but on PC the expansion pack appears to have also revived the gameplay-destroying horror of Digital Rights Management software Denuvo.
Reports have hit the Steam community forums moaning about issues with slowdown and freezing on the main menu screen, once they install the Plus DLC. According to hacker Voksi, the problems are almost all entirely down to “an insane amount of bloated Denuvo code, compared to the previous version”.
“[Some of the slowdown issues are] caused by a trigger in the time attack menu when you scroll down till the last levels, which is not closed properly, which causes Denuvo to continue writing in its section until the game is closed, which causes massive game slowdown,” Voksi writes on Reddit.
And, while we would certainly never endorse cracking games or circumventing copy or DRM protection on video games, Voksi – during an attempt to do just that with Mania Plus – claims to have discovered a DRM looping issue preventing legitimate users of the game to get past the menu screen.
This isn’t the first time Denuvo has caused problems for Sonic Mania PC players. The original game’s release in 2017 was delayed by two weeks on the platform, compared to home consoles, largely believed to be because of SEGA’s implementation of the DRM… and when it did launch on Steam, fans complained of slowdown and forced always-online features, to name but a few things.
All in all, it sounds like a bad time for PC players, and we hope that a fix is being prepared by SEGA to overcome these issues soon.
Why don’t these idiots just realize that denuvo is garbage? Even one of the Sonic Mania Devs themselves told fans to go complain to SEGA about this and they STILL refuse to remove this useless malware from their game. What a bunch of tools.
There’s also anecdotal evidence Denuvo is also causing some anti-virus products to flag the main executable as a virus. Obviously, this is a false positive, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.
Anecdotal because it’s not happened to me, but it did happen to one of my friends, and also because one instance does not a trend make.
I was trying to record the game bmflr YouTube because I love sonic games and wanted to play as mighty and ray and record the encore mods. Like some people I can’t afford a PS4,Xbox one or switch and thus the pc version is my only choice of playing the game and when recording it the game crashed when loading chemical plant though it was just a quick not responding and then back to gameplay and after that it started to slow down when playing the game or in the special stages to the point I thought oh I’m running out of gigabytes on my laptop and checked the space left and there was like 200 plus gigs left. I thought it was very strange but now I know what the problem is.
Denuvo is the primary reason why I haven’t bought Sonic Mania yet. If Sega ever decides to remove it, then I’ll buy.