The Resident Evil Revelations DRM saga seems to be at an end, at least for now, as a new patch for the survival horror shooter arrives from Capcom. Evidence from a previous patch for the Resident Evil spin-off suggested that it contained Enigma, a DRM (digital rights management) software designed to protect games from having their source files tampered with or being pirated. This led to a campaign of review bombing against not just Resident Evil Revelations but also other RE games on Steam, as well as other Capcom games – further review bombing followed after Capcom added Enigma to Monster Hunter Rise. A new update for Resident Evil Revelations, however, has just arrived, and it seems like Enigma might be gone from the horror game for good.
On Tuesday January 9, a Resident Evil Revelations Steam update seemingly added Enigma DRM. Players of the classic horror game soon responded by purposefully posting negative reviews on RE Revelations’ Steam page, as well as the pages for other, older Resident Evil games including RE5 and RE6. A post from Capcom on Wednesday January 10 explained that the previous update had been removed owing to an “issue,” and would be relaunched once the issue had been resolved.
The review bombing continued after Enigma was added to another Capcom game, Monster Hunter Rise. On Monday February 5, a new update was published for Resident Evil Revelations. However, it seemingly doesn’t put Enigma back into the game – according to one prominent Resident Evil modder, speaking exclusively to PCGamesN, there is no evidence of DRM software when scrutinizing the latest update.
“The game has had a bug for many years where it didn’t recognize the Samurai Edge DLC,” explains Resident Evil modder ‘FluffyQuack,’ who created the ReTool and Fluffy Manager 5000 tools for modding RE Engine games. “I think the previous patch, with Enigma, was meant to fix that, but from my testing, it had even bigger bugs related to DLC, such as not recognizing all of my DLC characters. I speculate that was the reason the Enigma patch was pulled, as it was pulled before the whole Enigma spectacle started blowing up.”
FluffyQuack shares images of the hex files for the first Resident Evil Revelations patch from January 9, which contains various mentions of Enigma.
The modder ran the patch through a third-party scanner, which also detected Enigma. FluffyQuack says that the latest patch, from February 5, does not contain the same traces of Enigma DRM.
“I looked at the executable [of the first patch] and Enigma is there. I did the same checks with the new executable, and there are no signs of Enigma. They did not add Enigma to this updated version of the patch, which I see as a big sign they must have noticed the enormous backlash.”
Based on recent reviews, Resident Evil Revelations still has an ‘overwhelmingly negative’ rating on Steam. Resident Evil 5 has a ‘mixed’ rating, whereas Monster Hunter Rise, which was updated to include Enigma, has a rating of ‘mostly negative.’ Whether Enigma will be removed from other Capcom games is unclear – FluffyQuack speculates that the DRM was stripped from Resident Evil Revelations because Capcom already had another patch for the game on the way.
“I think they skipped adding it to Revelations because they were actively working on a patch for it at the time, so that was an opportunity for them to address the reaction to Enigma,” the modder explains. “I don’t think it’s practical for them to remove Enigma this quickly from their games that have it, so we’ll just have to wait and see what they do moving forward with other games.”
Capcom has not replied to a request for comment at this time.
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