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.

  • dustyData@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    156
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    18 hours ago

    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.

    • surph_ninja@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      5 hours ago

      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.

      • Sabata@ani.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        23
        ·
        12 hours ago

        Its anti “going around our profit structure”. Got to make sure they can’t bypass paying for skins in a single player game.

      • Mistic@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        30
        ·
        edit-2
        14 hours ago

        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.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          12
          ·
          12 hours ago

          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.

          • Ohmmy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            5 hours ago

            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.

  • Maestro@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    110
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    20 hours ago

    Curious as to why this happens. My bet is on Ubisoft tampering in windows kernel space. Probably some copy protection or anti-cheat BS

    • surph_ninja@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      5 hours ago

      I’d be real interested to see if the problem continues, once someone disables the TPM piece of Win 11.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      9 hours ago

      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.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        9 hours ago

        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.

      • Brumefey
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        11 hours ago

        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.

        • SupraMario@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          4 hours ago

          Lol yea long ass time ago, when crack engines where a thing or even console codes. The fuck…

        • SupraMario@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          16 hours ago

          Most of it gets cracked anyways though, but I guess lol shit reason for them but only explanation.

          • syreus@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            11
            ·
            16 hours ago

            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.

      • Bilb!@lem.monster
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        15 hours ago

        I was curious too, and… Avatar appears to have a co-op mode. Not really high stakes for cheating.

    • RamblingPanda@lemmynsfw.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      48
      ·
      20 hours ago

      Yeah, probably. I’m ready to bash Microsoft, but when the opponent is Ubisoft I’m holding my horses. Ubisoft is cancer.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        11 hours ago

        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.

  • Dariusmiles2123
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    15 hours ago

    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…