I already wasn’t going to pay for another Ubisoft game ever again but this is absolutely the final nail in the coffin for me. Fucking atrocious.
Shadows’ EULA also includes a provision that allows the game to monitor your PC’s RAM to ensure you’re not running any unauthorized programs like macros, cheats, or hacks, a well-intentioned clause that nonetheless feels a touch out of place in a single-player game
Why the fuck would I allow Ubisoft to monitor my RAM while playing a SINGLE-PLAYER GAME. They just want to datamine my PC or something?
All it took for me to never buy Ubi again was their launcher
Ubisoft can monitor nothing but my balls.
Make sure they are unwashed while being monitored
You’re supposed to wash your balls?
A shit monitoring balls?
“If you betray us, Ubisoft, I’m going to cut off your balls and shove them up your ass so the next time you take a shit, you shit all over your balls!”
I don’t want that disease vector anywhere near my dangly bits, thanks.
Can we do something like reporting Denuvo or the kernel anticheats as malware in Windows defender?
A game with a built in system lever logger that could theoretically monitor even your bank transactions should be reported as spyware/malware and users installing it should have to expressly acknowledge / authorise this.
Normally I would say that Microsoft wouldn’t care and they would just make an exception, but after the CrowdStrike error, they might be just a little bit more careful. Or maybe I have too much faith in them
Yeah Susan, I’m sure Microsoft TOTALLY learned their lesson from the Crowdstrike incident. Y’know, since they’ve never had an anti-malware company cause worldwide outages because of a configuration error before.
They afraid of me cheating in a singleplayer game? Not that I’m ever going to play it in the first place.
Companies realized they can sell cheats as microtransactions instead and people will pay for them. They will likely also include some cosmetic microtransactions like their previous game, which they definitely don’t want people just cheating in. It’s why so many single player games require being always online as well.
“Cheating in”, aka doing something with the thing you paid for that you want to do with it. Fuck this company.
You’re not even paying for cheats in a ubisoft game, you’re just buying back the time they added in with pointless grind so you can play through the short storyline without having to run fetch quests for an extra 50 hours to pass through the level gates.
Can’t have you accessing skins and items they plan to sell!
Especially stuff already shipped in the game code!
deleted by creator
Imagine if they took all that ‘piracy prevention’ effort (that doesn’t really work in the end anyway) and put it towards actually making enjoyable games.
It’s certainly working because I’m not gonna bother playing the game
Right, and if I do I won’t be buying it.
See? Piracy prevented
Let me clarify, I will not be purchasing this game if I want to play it.
Doesn’t matter, had sex
These things don’t cost effort, they just buy a library and pump up the cost of the game and make the fucking publishers feel better about themselves.
Their trash games ain’t even worth to pirate anymore
The ultimate piracy protection
Thank you for putting my thoughts into words
Can’t they just… Make a “normal game”? One that you install, play and that’s it?. Why the fuck do they need to monitor Ram? What the hell?
Data mining, baby! It’s worth more than gold.
Anti cheat (it’s actually anti piracy which is not possible also they oops sell massive data dumps for cash oops)
Honestly also curious why this is necessary.
Ah, it’s in the article.
To top it all off, Shadows’ EULA also includes a provision that allows the game to monitor your PC’s RAM to ensure you’re not running any unauthorized programs like macros, cheats, or hacks, a well-intentioned clause that nonetheless feels a touch out of place in a single-player game and could potentially scare off some of the more suspicious players who aren’t comfortable with their hardware being monitored.
WTF do they care if you’re modding your own single player game that you paid for? They sound like assholes!
Micro transactions
…th…they are.
Ubisoft is usually exhibit A when it comes to asshole-ry.
Is there maybe an online multiplayer component to the game which might otherwise experience cheating? I dunno. 🤷♂️
They sell level boosters that you could otherwise circumvent with Cheat Engine.
Oh ffs 🤦♂️ If I bought the game and want to cheat myself out of the experience, just let me do so…!
If I’m understanding you correctly, level boosters are things you can activate to… skip levels? Reach character levels quicker?
Yeah they let you skip the artificially inflated grind in your single player experience.
Buying them is not cheating yourself out of the experience, but instead it brings back the intended speed of progression.
Correct. They make games that are dozens of hours long and filled with repetitive content, and if you skip the content you don’t want to do, you tend to be under leveled for the stuff you do want to do, and they’ll sell you boosters to hit that level instead.
unauthorized programs
No one gets to authorize programs to run on my PC but me.
It’s honestly very odd that it needs to do this for a single-player game.
All you have to do to get my money is let me be a pirate, a jedi, a ninja, or a samurai. My inner child can’t help themselves.
So how can Ubisoft be so terrible that I have literally not wanted to play their Pirate game, their StarWars game, and now their Ninja/Samurai game!?
Hey now! Ubisoft is still enabling your desire to become a pirate! Just … In a different way than they wanted.
Arrr! 🏴☠️🫡
I think that’s really the issue with Ubisoft, they just don’t make “must play” games anymore. Seriously, what’s the last universally liked Ubisoft game that everyone wanted to play? Far Cry 3. Close second is probably AC: Black flag but that was already suffering from AC fatigue and its critical acclaim has come retroactively. Those games are over a decade old. Ubisoft hasn’t released anything in the last decade where the mainstream gaming goes “We must play that”. Ubisoft simply doesn’t make exciting games anymore. They make games that are for everyone which also means they’re for no-one.
Honestly I just read Ubisoft and pass on it. They’ve been too hostile to customers for too long for me to consider.
Its been a while since i played. Probably dead these days. Back in the day everyone memed they were gonna add ninjas one day.
Thankfully there is a very simple, no-effort solution to this: Don’t play their trash.
I already don’t play their excruciatingly mediocre games and this just reinforces my avoidance is justified.
Also good gods they’ve been milking this tired franchise for almost 2 decades now.
Pirating also allows you to play it without the BS if you’re interested in the game.
Thanks to denuvo and there currently not being any active group capable of cracking denuvo, it’s not a guarantee the game will be cracked. Assassin‘s creed mirage took until last month, over a year after release, for a pirated copy to be available and it uses a debug executable, which may not become available for any other games or at least not in a timely manner. It might not be possible to play those games without the BS. Or on Linux, if it doesn’t run without kernel access for RAM monitoring
Denuvo works on a subscription basis. Sooner or later, they’re going to decide it’s not worth paying for anymore and the game will be available to pirate. Waiting a year is nothing.
Well, they haven’t so far removed denuvo from a single game, even those that have been cracked already. Ubisoft is big enough, that they might have their very own deal with Denuvo
What happened to Empress or whatever they were called?
I haven’t paid close attention but I think she started a cult or something.
From what I understand, she received flak for her anti trans views and decided to call it quits. She is Russian, so maybe she was drafted into the war effort as a hacker, or mosy likely she got paid off by these companies.
Most crackers are in countries where extradition for this would be difficult even with solid evidence. Companies have changed tactic to just paying them off so they just don’t do it, or so the rumor mill says. 200k a year to a handful of people is a drop in the bucket for the denuvo cartel.
On hiatus, apparently. Hasn’t cracked anything since July 2023. Not sure why.
Denuvo is used by these companies because it’s shockingly effective. IIRC it has yet to be cracked on any game.
Games that end up being available on the high seas have generally stopped paying for the Denuvo license.
You know it’s bad when you don’t want to even pirate the game.
Eyyyyyyy fuck you Ubisoft.
I love them paying for a denuvo license on a game no one even cares enough about to pirate anyway.
Ubisoft may have given up making entertaining games a long time ago but they still provide me with entertainment.
Not the version I download
This game is already hard to want. Why make it hard to play too?
And just like that, I couldn’t be less interested in this game.
Already lost interest in Assassin’s Creed after they abandoned the Desmond timeline…
Played a tiny bit of the Black Flag one for the fun shanty stuff but that’s been it for me now for probably a decade… so all this has done has lowered my already completely evaporated interest of “apathy” down now to “actively avoid as if it were a virus.”
The original AC games were really great for their time, and to be honest I enjoyed the ones that came after the trilogy despite feeling like the same game with a new coat of paint over and over.
But they really knocked it out of the park when they overhauled all the controls and mechanics with Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. Yes, there are issues with them like with every open world game, but it is really worth checking out. Valhalla is obviously beautiful and very refined but I favor Odyssey for the sheer fun factor.
Agreed on these new ones, though.
