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.
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.
Most of it gets cracked anyways though, but I guess lol shit reason for them but only explanation.
Only the ones that come with some ultimate edition, the store exclusive ones never do.
They only need to make sure it’s difficult enough the average user can’t be bothered to figure out the workaround. I’m sure without looking they made a considerate sum from the neglected children market.
That’s the truth, they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t make money off it.
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.
Lol yea long ass time ago, when crack engines where a thing or even console codes. The fuck…
And a lot of the items were introduced on the initiative of developers without any coordination with Marketing team
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.