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

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.

Announcing upfront that The Veilguard won't feature Denuvo is a simple bit of good PR targeting the PC RPG fans that form the base of the Dragon Age fandom. As project director Mike Gamble puts it on Twitter: "We trust you."

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