Mass Effect: Andromeda pirates won’t get the game’s new faces

Not until they break the game’s new antipiracy code, anyway Mass Effect: Andromeda's PC version was cracked and pirated just 10 days after its March 21 launch. That would seem to moot the updated anti-piracy code that was included with the game's 1. 05 patch, no? Well, not if pirates want the updated, non-bugeyed, non-weird faces. As Dark Side of Gaming points out, what crackers broke into at launch was the old version of Denuvo's anti-tamper technology.

The new stuff, which is only used in four games, three of them launching since late February, hasn’t been broken yet. The old protection in fact may be what hackers compromised back in February when they were able to pirate Resident Evil 7 within a week of its launch. Denuvo protection is by the company’s admission not 100 percent impenetrable, but the goal is to lengthen the time and effort it takes to crack open a game using it. Sure, there are still pirated copies of Mass Effect: Andromeda in the wild. But as we've argued that the game at launch was effectively an early access title, pirates have an inferior version.

And it’s a version that will get more inferior as BioWare continues to “fix” Mass Effect: Andromeda over time — and that includes changes to the game's relationships and dialogues. A year ago, some prominent pirates bemoaned Denuvo's increasing difficulty, although that may have been misinformation to disguise pirates' skill or determination at beating Denuvo. Who can tell. They still have to get back to crackin' if they want to play the latest version of Mass Effect: Andromeda for free. This version of Denuvo may be unbeaten so far, but who knows, maybe putting it in a highly visible game will bring in more pirates to take it down.