I fired up my PC yesterday, grabbed a coffee, and settled in for a long session of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Eivor was ready to raid a monastery, but my screen? Totally black. Not the cinematic kind—the frustrating, dead kind. A quick dive into forums revealed I wasn’t alone. It turns out the shiny new Windows 11 version 24H2 update has been silently breaking a bunch of Ubisoft games, and Microsoft has finally put its foot down by blocking the upgrade for anyone who owns them.
Since 2024, Windows 11’s biggest feature updates have been a mixed bag, but this one stings more than a hidden blade to the throat. Microsoft officially acknowledged the mess on its support site, noting that certain Ubisoft titles “might become unresponsive while starting, loading, or during active gameplay.” Some users, myself included, are getting the dreaded black screen instead of our favorite worlds. The list of casualties is surprisingly well-curated—it’s basically a greatest-hits collection of Ubisoft’s open-world catalogue:
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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
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Assassin’s Creed Origins
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Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
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Star Wars Outlaws
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Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
I can’t be the only one who finds it ironic—these are precisely the titles that push high-end hardware to its limits, and now a Windows update has them begging for mercy. Microsoft quickly applied a compatibility hold: if you have any of these games installed, Windows Update simply won’t offer you the 24H2 upgrade. That’s actually a sensible safeguard. The company even warns users not to manually force the update using the Installation Assistant or Media Creation Tool. Trust me, I nearly did that, and I’m glad I didn’t.
The situation isn’t entirely hopeless. For Star Wars Outlaws, Microsoft has shipped a “temporary mitigation” that stops the game from crashing outright. However, they caution that performance may still take a hit. Running through the dusty canyons of Toshara with stuttering frames? Not exactly the scoundrel fantasy Ubisoft promised. Other games remain completely in the dark—Ubisoft and Microsoft are reportedly working on a proper fix, but we don’t have a timeline yet.
If you’re already stuck with a frozen game, the immediate workaround is a classic PC gaming ritual: the three-finger salute. Hit Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager, find the game process under the Processes tab (it might hide under the launcher’s name), select it, and smash that End Task button. It’s not elegant, but it stops you from having to hard-reboot your rig. I’ve been using this method at least twice an hour while stubbornly refusing to roll back the update.
Here’s a twist that makes me crack a smile despite the chaos: earlier this year, Ubisoft actually listened to its players and removed those infuriating forced stealth sections from Star Wars Outlaws. Remember how one wrong step would teleport you back to a checkpoint like a time-loop punishment? Yeah, that’s gone. An update finally lets players just shoot their way out when spotted, instead of resetting the entire sequence. It’s a glorious quality-of-life change—ironic that the game now faces a completely different kind of breakage from the operating system side.
This entire episode reeks of a deeper compatibility problem between DirectX 12 implementations and Ubisoft’s Anvil engine. Both Valhalla and Frontiers of Pandora lean heavily on cutting-edge rendering features that the 24H2 kernel might be mishandling. But I’m no developer—I’m just a player who wants to ride my eight-legged horse through a Viking paradise without prayer.
For now, my advice is simple: if you haven’t installed Windows 11 24H2 and you love your Ubisoft library, just wait. Microsoft’s compatibility hold is your friend. Even when the “optional update” tantalizingly appears in Settings, resist the urge. I’ve been gaming on PC long enough to know that a rushed fix often comes with its own set of dragons. The companies promise updates “when they know more,” which is tech-speak for “we’re on it, please stop tagging us on Twitter.”
In the meantime, I’ll keep ending tasks, drinking coffee, and staring longingly at the frozen fjords of Norway. Maybe by the time you read this, the real fix will be live—and Eivor will finally get to finish that raid.