As reported by VGC, Microsoft updated its support website to reveal it has placed a temporary block on Windows 11 for users with those games installed.
“After installing Windows 11, version 24H2, you might encounter issues with some Ubisoft games,” Microsoft said. "These games might become unresponsive while starting, loading or during active gameplay.
"In some cases, users might receive a black screen. The affected games are Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
This why kernel level anticheat is the stupidiest idea. It’s already hard enough to have the developers coordinate on a mission critical component of the OS. Now imagine dozens of profit hungry, lowest effort publishing companies all meddling and putting their greasy hands into that code at the same time. No, thank you.
are these games even multiplayer? is it anti cheat or anti piracy?
Its anti “going around our profit structure”. Got to make sure they can’t bypass paying for skins in a single player game.
I believe Ubisoft considers these games as “life service,” despite them effectively being single-player.
Kernel-level anticheats are specifically anti cheat. Although, if you take cheats to kernel level, they become anti-cheat in name only. For all the normal players out there, it is practically malware. No software ever should have permissions to track everything you do, see everything you have, and brick your OS just because.
With the caveat that there’s a lot of space in which users can do things that even kernel level anti-cheat can’t detect. Like it can’t see what’s going on inside plugged in hardware to know if an attached video capture device and the mouse and keyboard is actually all connected to an embedded system that analyses the video stream and adjusts the actual user input to automatically fire if it detects an enemy that would be hit or to nudge the looking direction a bit so that firing would hit.
I’ve also seen reports of exploits that use the presence of cheat detection combined with other exploits to install cheats on target systems to get their target banned from the game entirely. Which both forces them to deal with a situation they never intended to in the first place (they never tried to cheat), it also gives plausible deniability to actual cheaters who get caught.
One of those cases happened during a live tournament. Dude is playing and all of a sudden can see enemy locations through walls. He knew what was up and left the game to avoid being banned, which makes the tournament itself a bit of a joke.
Yeah, but I’m loving shoving this in the face of everyone who gave us shit when we told them the Windows 11 TPM requirement was for OS level DRM.
Enjoy your shit sandwich, haters.
Huh? Where did you see anything related to TPMs in this story?
My assumption is it’s the OS level DRM that’s doing this, which is the feature that caused the TPM requirement for Windows 11.
But if you have an article with enough details that we don’t have to lean on assumptions, shoot me the link.
Curious as to why this happens. My bet is on Ubisoft tampering in windows kernel space. Probably some copy protection or anti-cheat BS
Aren’t all of these SP games? The fuck they need anti-cheat for?
You know the cosmetics things that you could unlock using cheat codes 20 years ago in single player games ? You now have to pay for it. And they bloat your OS kernel to ensure that you don’t get those valuables skins without actually paying for it.
It was interesting learning about the insane shit firewalls and drivers did prior to vista.
Even after, some of it is pretty crazy.
Like the driver for controlling one vendor’s LED lights had a generic PCI FW updater (or something similar) included that it exposed to user space. This meant a) changing the LED colours or parameters required a firmware update rather than the firmware handling input from the system to adjust colours without new code, and b) other software could use this and just change the bus id of the target to update other firmware willy nilly.
It also had to compete for bus time and sending a full firmware update takes more time than a few colour update parameters. Average case might be ok, but it would make worst case scenarios worse, like OS wants to page in from disk 1 while a game needs to read shader code from disk 2 that it needs to immediately send to the GPU but the led controller decides it’s time to switch to the next theme in the list oh and there’s some packets that just came in over the network and the audio buffer is getting low. GPU ends up missing a frame deadline for the display engine and your screen goes black for a second while it re-establishes the connection between GPU and monitor.
Yeah, probably. I’m ready to bash Microsoft, but when the opponent is Ubisoft I’m holding my horses. Ubisoft is cancer.
Its not a big loss for gaming really
You can’t make this shit up, it’s so hilarious.
Man those 40 people are probably so pissed
Millions of people play Assassin’s Creed games.
Yes I don’t know if you got it - but I was actually joking.
I guess I don’t understand why that would be funny.
Finally a good Windows update.
Task failed successfully.
They confirmed this last week. Just because IGN wants their daily clicks, doesn’t mean we should keep re-posting the same news.
First I’m hearing of it.
Congratulations?
Terminally online ^ this guy
Donuts has a total of 300 comments, to your 1.50k. Compared to you he’s online for an hour a week.
Comment ratio is not an indication of whether someone is online, just whether they feel the need to comment a lot. I tend to spend the same amount of time reading whether I’m commenting or not.
Lurkers can be terminally online.
If someone is going to try to make fun of another person for being “terminally online” it does matter.
