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?
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.
There’s also the reverse effect where kernel level anticheats provide the illusion of no cheaters so people can cheat more openly without being reported or kicked from the lobby/server like the old days.
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?
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
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.
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.
Only the ones that come with some ultimate edition, the store exclusive ones never do.
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.
Finally a good Windows update.
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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
Often I really do while playing games. Sometimes I love a good intricate or full of social commentary games, other times I just want to move my mouse and watch things die when I press a button. Though it has to look pretty at the very least if it’s the latter type.
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.
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
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
antichristanticheat
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.
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.
Its like sometimes people don’t see every single post.
I agree, but why does that mean we need to regurgitate the same news stories every few days?
Is it the same user posting both?
If not, they most likely missed the first one. I doubt most people check whether something that looks new to them has already been posted.
Do you want people to post the same news story every week in case you happened to miss it?
I don’t care if different people do or don’t post it multiple times across multiple days. I already get to see some cross community duplication, so someone posting because they are late to the game gets lost in the noise.
It isn’t like a discussion can only happen one time and if people miss it then they are out of luck. If someone posts late and nobody wants to engage the repost will fade off into obscurity.
Rare Microsoft Win.
Finally, someone fixed Star Wars Outlaws.
Its not a big loss for gaming really
finally, someone fixed Windows 11.
now to install SW Outlaws.
