Two Point Hospital removes Denuvo DRM as part of its first patch

The controversial DRM proved ineffective at preventing Day Zero piracy of Sega's hospital management sim.

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Sega and Two Point Studios launched their new hospital management simulator Two Point Hospital last week to critical and commercial success. The game marries a solid management game and a wonderful comedic tone that perfectly evokes the classic PC games from which it drew inspiration. The game has moved over 100K copies on Steam and is currently carrying nearly 20K concurrent players. Gamers who were on the fence about a purchase because of the inclusion of Denuvo DRM have no more reason to resist, as developer Two Point Studios announced that the DRM would be replaced with Steamworks DRM in the game’s first patch.

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Two Point Hospital was reportedly cracked the day prior to its official release. This crack facilitated a bypass of the Denuvo DRM and let users play the full game without first purchasing it from Steam. The process of cracking the game was allegedly simple due to quirks related to the Unity Engine on which the game was built.

The full patch notes are as listed below:

Crashes

  • Fixed crash on boot, caused by machines reporting that they don't support 720p
  • Fixed crash on boot caused by invalid timezone
  • Added logging to help track down further crashes

Saves

  • Fixed majority of load fails (These were mostly caused by guest trainer or room building. The issue was most commonly seen in Mitten University)
  • Fixed various cases of bad data getting in to save files
  • Fall backs for characters that were saved in a bad state so that they can pick up what they were doing

AI

  • Fixed some issues to do with characters getting the nav fail icon over their head for seemingly no reason
  • Fixed characters sometimes switching between behaviors too often
  • Fixed doctors behaving weirdly when being interrupted in operating theater
  • Fixed characters sometimes teleporting out of rooms
  • Fixed VIPs that slide around after loading a save
  • Fixed Recurvery machine upgrade causing invalid interaction points, which could cause the room to become broken

Other

  • Fixed item placement breaking when you have a clock over a fire extinguisher
  • Fixed a occasional problem caused by items being moved to a blueprint
  • Fixed localisation error in Settings screen (for German, Chinese and Polish)
  • Replaced Denuvo anti-tamper with Steam DRM

The Steam Community post announcing the patch also explains how users can get early access to the new fixes (as the patch is still in beta).

Contributing Tech Editor

Chris Jarrard likes playing games, crankin' tunes, and looking for fights on obscure online message boards. He understands that breakfast food is the only true food. Don't @ him.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    September 4, 2018 2:05 PM

    Chris Jarrard posted a new article, Two Point Hospital removes Denuvo DRM as part of its first patch

    • reply
      September 4, 2018 3:55 PM

      /equip tinfoil hat
      Makes me wonder since it was zero day cracked that it may mean a possible contract with Denuvo was broken, and the publisher earned instant money for the DRM not performing for X days guaranteed.

      • reply
        September 4, 2018 3:57 PM

        I've read stuff like the contracts state the game has to remain un-cracked for X amount of time...stuff like that. No idea if it's true though.

      • reply
        September 4, 2018 6:18 PM

        Sounds like a broken contract, then. They should be pushing for no cracks until the retail sales cycle is well underway.

      • reply
        September 4, 2018 6:28 PM

        Denuvo doesn't offer refunds apparently. Also it wasn't cracked so much as the developers deployed a non denuvo protected dll in the Linux release which was used to circumvent the protection in the windows release.

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