This is, actually, good news for Windows 11 users.

Microsoft is officially blocking the release of Windows 11 24H2 for computers that have a couple different Ubisoft titles installed. Ubisoft titles that include Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Assassin's Creed Origins, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora are on the short list of games that, if installed on your Windows 11 machine, prevent the 24H2 update from downloading.

These titles were added to the ever growing list of known issues for Windows 11 24H2, as shared by Microsoft directly. Since the 24H2 update started rolling out in early October, a growing number of players reported issues related to the aforementioned titles. Those issues with these games included, but were not limited to, games freezing at launch, game crashes, and vastly degraded performance. Reports of these issues were shared through Reddit (2) and the Windows Feedback Hub.

Microsoft issued an official statement on the issues encountered.

Ubisoft was able to release a temporary hotfix for Star Wars Outlaws. This hotfix comes with the warning that while the game should work better, performance issues are expected. A permanent fix is in the works but there is no estimate on when that may arrive or whether the fix will come from Microsoft or Ubisoft.

The issues with games on 24H2 may not be limited to Ubisoft titles either. Several games that make use of Easy Anti-Cheat can result in a blue screen. There are also several non-gaming related issues with the 24H2 update.

For those of you on Windows 11 Pro, you are able to postpone the update to 24H2 using Group Policy Editor. Changing this will still allow you to receive regular security updates and should only defer the feature update to 24H2 for however long you specify.

This would perhaps be a wise move to defer the update by a few months while Microsoft works through these potentially annoying issues. Even if you don't play these specific games, the list of issues for 24H2 is long enough that deferring the update for a while would probably be the smart thing to do. I personally deferred the update for my own machine by several months after reading about the (now fixed) issue with black screens when alt-tabbing in and out of games. Since that time, the list of known issues has only grown and I'm keeping the update pause in place for a while longer.