8mo ago

Microsoft Confirms Windows 11 Update Kills Star Wars Outlaws, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Other Ubisoft Games

www.ign.com

Microsoft Confirms Windows 11 Update Kills Star Wars Outlaws, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Other Ubisoft Games - IGN

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.

57 comments

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?
  
  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.
  
  Its anti "going around our profit structure". Got to make sure they can't bypass paying for skins in a single player game.
- 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?
Curious as to why this happens. My bet is on Ubisoft tampering in windows kernel space. Probably some copy protection or anti-cheat BS
- Yeah, probably. I'm ready to bash Microsoft, but when the opponent is Ubisoft I'm holding my horses. Ubisoft is cancer.
- Aren't all of these SP games? The fuck they need anti-cheat for?
  
  It's probably kernel level anti-piracy shit, but same results.
  
  Ubisoft sells cosmetic stuff in their singleplayer games.
  
  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.
  
  I was curious too, and... Avatar appears to have a co-op mode. Not really high stakes for cheating.
- 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, developers like to rely on undocumented or quirky behavior.
  But then, Microsoft also likes to change code that may or may not behave like the documentation says it should.
  
  Microsoft does a piss poor job of documenting things, so a certain level of reliance on undocumented behavior is hard to avoid.
  That's no excuse for games hacking the kernel, though.
- I’d be real interested to see if the problem continues, once someone disables the TPM piece of Win 11.
Finally a good Windows update.
- Task failed successfully.
You can't make this shit up, it's so hilarious.
- Man those 40 people are probably so pissed
  
  I love trash that doesn’t make me think too hard
  
  Millions of people play Assassin's Creed games.
The games work just fine on linux
- So?
  This is likely a patch which blocks certain kernel hooks
  It's actually good for both Linux and Windows gaming ultimately because maybe Ubisoft will stop doing stupid anti piracy or anti cheating things that can break your system
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.
  
  Seeing the same news posted two days later is considered terminally online?
  How can we have a discussion about news if we pretend whatever we discussed yesterday doesn't exist anymore?
  If there was a new development I wouldn't speak up. But this is just a different outlet posting the same news story, only two days later compared to the rest.
If it’s related to anticheat, I wonder how they do it on consoles.
Probably, it’s not needed because consoles are more locked down I guess..
- Consoles don't use ~~antichrist~~ anticheat
Rare Microsoft Win.
Finally, someone fixed Star Wars Outlaws.
Its not a big loss for gaming really

57 comments