Dragon Age: The Veilguard ditches controversial Denuvo DRM because "we trust you"

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The lack of DRM means "there will be no preload period for PC players"

Dragon Age: The Veilguard
(Image credit: EA)

Alongside the reveal of system requirements for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, EA and BioWare have given PC players a classic good news, bad news combo. The RPG won't feature the controversial Denuvo DRM software, but that means you won't be able to preload the game on PC.

"Dragon Age: The Veilguard won’t include any third-party DRM (such as Denuvo) on any platform," the devs say in a new blog post, which also runs down the full system requirements. "The lack of DRM means that there will be no preload period for PC players," they add. Instead, if you're on PC, you'll have to wait for the global launch time of 9am PDT / 12pm EDT / 4pm GMT on October 31 to start downloading before you can play.

Denuvo is a form of digital rights management software - or DRM - intended to make it more difficult for pirates to crack games and distribute them online, and historically it's been far more effective at thwarting pirates than other forms of protection. Denuvo's precise impacts have always varied from game to game, but there have been enough reports of degraded performance for the software to have become infamous among PC players.

BioWare says it spent 200,000 hours testing Dragon Age: The Veilguard - and that's just for the RPG's PC version.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.