long story short, I bought FFXV long before I cared about Denuvo but never played it, the game got cracked but Square Enix still haven’t removed Denuvo from the game on Steam; now I don’t want to install Denuvo spyware, if I download the game from Steam, don’t launch it, and just overwrite the .exe with the one from a repack, am I in the clear? would it work? I’d like to get the achievements, otherwise I’d just install a repack
Denuvo cracks are usually just bypasses. You’re still runnung denuvo unless the crack has actually removed the DRM and that’s very rare. Denuvo getting removed by the developers before it even gets cracked at all is pretty common since Denuvo is a subscription service, not a one time fee.
You can get them separately from gamecopyworld or cs.rin.ru forums.
The benefit of grabbing cracks separate is you’ll see which exact files are included/affected.
Fitgirl is a repacker, not a cracker so this really depends what kind of a release is it, so you’d have to test by yourself.
It should work when it comes to launching the game, I’ve done it before in the past. But in theory, it’s unlikely to work with achievements given how cracks tend to overwrite the steam api dll files and hooks, likely disabling achievements in the process as part of the crack.
Something you could try is to copy the steam dll files like steam_api64.dll from the original copy on steam to the cracked one and see if that does the trick.
You might also need to copy some other files over, depending on what’s in the crack. Sometimes they also have a steam_api.ini file and maybe a .DLL file, in addition to the .exe.
But yeah, you’d really just want to copy what’s in the crack over and overwrite anything it’s trying to. If it doesn’t work, you can just “verify game files” in steam to get the originals back.
Of course this also assumes the crack is for the Steam version. If it was cracked for the EGS version, it won’t necessarily work with a Steam copy.
Denuvo has its tendrils all over every aspect of a game. I am sceptical the executable is the only file that would need to be replaced to completely subvert it. That said, the .nfo on the hacked version might actually list all the files they modified for the release, that’s where I’d start.
