Addressing the Resident Evil 4 Enigma Situation - Did Chun-Li Kill All Modding Yet Again?

I'm getting a sense of deja vu... Two years ago, Capcom added Enigma Protector to Resident Evil: Revelations and big parts of the internet was shouting that modding had become impossible and it was all Chun-Li's fault! And it looks like that Chun-Li is up to her old shenanigans once again, this time aiming straight at Resident Evil 4 remake. More information to follow...

Short summary if you can't be bothered to read all of this: this isn't much more than a nothingburger and you can play the game just fine with mods. At most, you might have to download an updated version of a few mods.

What is Enigma Protector? It's software that adds a protection layer for an executable by encrypting parts of it and preventing debuggers from being attached. I could be wrong on this, but I think another part of it is that you can define parts of the codebase to run under an VM in a way to obfuscate it, making it harder to reverse-engineer. Parts of its marketing mention that this can help against piracy.

It has some similarities to Denuvo in that respect, though Denuvo's sole intent is to prevent piracy while Enigma's intent seems to protect the binary in general. Both also have the side effect that they can adversely affect performance (from my understanding, Denuvo usually affects parts of the codebases that's run relatively rarely, which can make it make loading slower). One huge difference between the two is that Denuvo is actually fairly competent at preventing piracy as Denuvo-protected games can take months, if not years, to be cracked!

As to why someone would use Enigma over Denuvo: price. Denuvo costs 25,000 USD per month to license per game, which explains why we commonly see publishers remove Denuvo from a game after a period of time. And good news, that's exactly what Capcom did for Resident Evil 4 remake a few days ago!

Bad news, they replaced it with Enigma the same day! So, how bad is this? Did they finally attain their ultimate goal to destroy all modding as revenge after the notorious Chun-Li scandal?

Well, not quite. From a modding standpoint, this has a relatively small effect. It would affect some mods that hook onto the game process and modify code or values in memory. Those might need to be updated. RE Framework still works just fine -- not even needing an update. The vast majority of file mods continue to work with no changes.

Oh, fun fact: This isn't even the first time Enigma was added to RE4R. It was also present in the demo version of the game, three years ago. It definitely seems like Capcom's MO is to prioritize Denuvo to protect a game, with Enigma being their second choice if a game is old or it's some kind of free release.

Maybe I shouldn't downplay the mod impact entirely. A mod user isn't affected, and most mod authors aren't affected either, but the people making certain mods or modding tools that mod the game in a way where they have to get around Enigma's protection layer will have a tougher time, which is annoying. From what I've heard, getting that protection layer isn't hard for someone who's experienced, but it's certainly an annoyance.

Performance does seem to be impacted as well. I did a small test by loading various savegames and not touching the input so I can compare the framerate for identical scenes. In the scenes I tested, these were the performance differences (higher number means old Denuvo build ran faster): 0%, -2%, +7%, +20%, 11%.

One scene actually runs slightly faster with the Enigma build, one ran the same, while others ran faster with the Denuvo build, with one scene having a very big difference. I noticed in my tests that GPU usage was higher with the Denuvo build, which I think implies the Enigma build has a bigger CPU bottleneck. I saw Digital Foundry say they were looking into that performance impact of this patch and I hope they'll do a thorough test.

By the way, if someone wants to revert to the old Denuvo build, you can install this: https://www.nexusmods.com/residentevil42023/mods/5667?tab=files (don't install this via the mod manager! Just copy the files to the game install directory)

I'll end this post with a Q/A section:

Q: You never explained how Chun-Li factors into this? Was Ada Wong actually one of Chun-Li's secret identities while on an police assignment!?
A: The Chun-Li angle is really, really stupid. In the middle of 2023, there was an online tournament where the streaming computer had a mod installed with Chun-Li wearing her birthday suit. Ever since that scandal, a big part of the internet is seemingly convinced that this has sparked Capcom to go on an anti-modding crusade, by doing actions like adding Enigma to their games (something they had done before the Chun-Li incident) in order to prevents mods from working (even though Enigma doesn't actually affect birthday suit mods). My favourite part of this theory is that Capcom hasn't done a single thing to prevent SF6 from loading mods, which is the game Chun-Li stars in.

Q: Does Capcom hate mods?
A: I am honestly uncertain how to think about this whole thing. They had a presentation back in 2023 on RE Engine and one video covered what they do for security. That video focuses on piracy and cheating, but they say that "However, for the purposes of anti-cheat and anti-piracy, all mods are defined as cheats." They've certainly added a lot of checks over the years, and though I'm not always certain if these checks are there to prevent piracy or mods, at the end of day, these checks end up being a huge annoyance for modders and something that doesn't actually affect cheaters or crackers as they're used to dealing with much more powerful protection layers.

I'll be blunt, these efforts by Capcom feel extremely amateurish and pointless. Did you know that if you installed Dragon's Dogma 2 to a directory that contains "natives" in its path, the game will crash at launch? That's due to their code that checks for mods.

Remember the disastrous performance issues RE8 had at launch? That was due to their custom anti-tamper that hashes all code in memory when certain actions were performed. Monster Hunter Wilds had a performance issue caused by a similar problem.

On the bright side, I know for a fact that there are people within Capcom that love mods. There was an interview with the director and lead producer of Devil May Cry 5 that praised what the mod community does. So it's not as if Capcom as a whole has an anti-modding stance.

Q: Hello, I am Mr John Capcom, do you have something to tell me?
A: Pretty please look at the practical effects of your custom anti-tamper and Enigma implementation and re-consider if it's actually worth it. If you want to prevent piracy: just rely on Denuvo. RE3R had far less of the custom anti-tamper code you've got right now and it was never cracked (until Capcom themselves removed Denuvo, that is). All of the anti-tamper stuff you're doing is a waste: It's not good enough to prevent piracy (that's actually thanks to Denuvo), and, unfortunately, it's not even good enough to prevent cheating. It's the same deal with Enigma.

Q: Any final words before we finally end this endlessly long post?
A: I'd just like to say that winter can be very poopy and I don't like ice. It's coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere.