idk how uninstalling and reinstalling an entire game due to something that sounds like it's drm is an acceptable solution when steam and about everything else including mmo launchers let you scan integrity and repair errors only downloading what is needed. stuff like this and spending days 'acquiring license' to begin to preload, and being told to turn my internet back on in order to even launch the game is unacceptable especially when the publisher literally is my entire operating system and doesn't need to be a paranoid control freak.

phoning home is the one denuvo thing I hate and that has made me unable to play a game in the past when I moved and didn't have net for a while. I had drives full of multiplayer games except the one single-player I saved for the move when I was clueless about denuvo at the time. I did patch it and launched it, but my pc was off for so long the bios reset by the time I got it hooked back, I think that set denuvo off. Either way, I only ran the game once after that patch since that is a habit because of the steam first-run concept, I do it compulsively to be safe. That wasn't good enough for denuvo, possibly because the bios reset or it had been a couple of weeks idk.

But anyways, in this game I have had long hangs at that same part after it goes fullscreen. Seeming like it was gonna crash when tabbing out once the game launches to turn my internet back off unless I waited until the menu options show up or I load a community. It could get some sort of hang that is unrelated to that, and the tabbing may worsen or trigger it even, but it felt suspicious to me. Since I tabbed once to open a webpage and it didn't hang, cause my internet was still on I assumed. This is gonna be the last windows store game I play.

It's the worst drm and marketplace experience for myself in a very long time. Even EA treats me much better and less like a criminal, it's ironic. I can't even hook rtss and make sure as we approach summer my gpu isn't gonna cook. Let alone vorpx to experiment with it. I can't use cheat engine. I won't be able to mod the game. I bet I won't even able to back up my saves in case they become corrupt or I have to install windows again for some reason or just to clean it up in time. All because windows store encrypts everything like ransomware. It's functionally ransomware, you have to be connected to the internet and logged into your windows account (fulfill the demands of the process or user that encrypts your data) or your encrypted data is locked and unavailable to you. If you are as OCD as I am about storage management, treating it all like hidden files and providing absolutely no way for you to browse what is on the drive and to see how much space it all consumes will drive you guano crazy when doing drive cleanups.