The PC port of Resident Evil Village was not terribly unoptimized, but it also did not make many players happy. Even the owners of more expensive graphics card models had the same “micro-twitches” as those who played on minimally supported hardware and this was unfortunately not improved by the official game updates.
Some people have managed to alleviate the situation with various tricks, such as removing and re-inserting the graphics card into the PCI slot, installing older versions of drivers etc. But the most effective repair seems to have come with a pirated version of the game.
Basically, the first tests show that anti-piracy protection was probably the biggest culprit for the problematic performance of the game on the PC. This isn’t the first such case – we’ve seen it many times before, but apparently publishers are willing to risk negative publicity with this practice in exchange for the games not being available to pirates for the first few months of sales.
The case of Resident Evil Village on PC was specific because the game reportedly used a dual piracy protection system, which in the case of some slower and older processors negatively affected the game’s performance.
It remains to be seen whether the Capcom team will now remove anti-piracy protection to players who got the game legally now that the same protection has been breached. Previous experiences tell us that they could, as Denuvo protection was subsequently removed from PC versions of games such as Resident Evil 3, Devil May Cry 5 and Monster Hunter World.
It is also important to note that, even with some performance issues on PC, the game still sold remarkably well – selling 4.5 million copies in just 9 weeks. If you wanna know more about it we covered the sales more in depth in this article. And we still have that DLC coming up, so we’ll see if everything is going to be fixed by then.
