A question about compatibility

Are you suggesting Microsoft should be designing their general use OS with 10+ year old game compatibility in mind, or that Ubisoft should commit to patch everything they put out for every new OS version even 10+ years old? Neither really makes much sense, so I wouldn't call it anyone's fault.

Suffice it to say, just because one older game works on Windows 10 doesn't necessarily mean all will. PC games definitely have much better backwards compatibility options than consoles, but there's often a lot more leg work needed on the part of the player, whether that be manually editing settings, searching out fan patches if official ones have stopped, etc.

This isn't unique to older games either. It isn't unusual to get a relatively new game, which should run with your computer's specs, and have it either not start up, or start with any number of issues. Then it is a matter of seeing if the publisher has it as a known issue, tracking down other folks with the same problem and what they're doing, see if there's a patch available, etc. PC is a great format for gaming, and 90% of the time, there's a way to enjoy something with a minimal amount of work, but that other 10%, it can be time consuming or frustrating to search for fixes.

I was curious, so did check around a bit. Ubisoft is a bit notorious for DRM issues on PC, and there are apparently some older versions of DRM that are incompatible with Windows 10, but that doesn't seem to be the case with Far Cry. Some Google searches did show people having to run in Windows compatibility mode, change their install directory, make sure to run with admin rights, etc, but it does seem doable. Others seem to be running it with no issues at all.

Yeah, there's this particular window for pc games (around 2003-2008) in which pc games were turning into a nightmare, with plenty of invasive DRM schemes that often meant the games had too many compatibility and performance issues - the most infamous release is probably GTA 4, for being such a huge game that had so many problems caused by all the DRMs and systems you had to login thrown on top of each other - SecuROM, GFWL, Rockstar Social Club and Steam DRM. It's a fucking mess.

Games from this period are notoriously more difficult to run on modern pcs than the games before or after it - last year, I played through every single 90s Tomb Raider games without encountering any problems; Thief 1&2, System Shock 2 and Deus Ex all ran smoothly too. But 2003-2008 games need much more tinkering to get them working, unless they were patched more recently (like all the Valve games and others like Bioshock that were patched to get rid of GFWL). I know that Ubisoft ones are especially troublesome, as none of them received later official patches.