this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025

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Mildly Infuriating

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Games that won't launch and won't give you any errormessage (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by Sati1984@lemmy.world to c/mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This happened to me a few times lately.

Half Life 2 VR Mod - Played it for ~4 hours, before all of a sudden it won't launch. I click on play in Steam, and after 3-4 seconds, nothing happens, then the play button is active again. No errormessage, nothing.

Resident Evil 2 Remake - I have almost 15 hours in it, almost finished the Claire campaign, when from one day to the next it won't launch. Just a black window pops up for one second, then it just stops, the play button is active again, so this game also leaves the user hanging without any errormessage.

Look, I have been gaming on PC since 2000, and with 25 years of experience, these situations are infuriating for me. I have my goto steps (check file integrity in Steam, update nVidia drivers, ec.) and if those don't work, I look on the Steam forums, google, etc for solutions, so eventually I'm gonna figure it out.

But dear gamedevs, please, please, please for the sake of less savvy players, include at least some clue of what the user should do. A blanket statement to the effect of "game failed to launch, please try the following: verify game files, uninstall then reinstall game, make sure you are on the latest drivers for your GPU, etc etc. If game still won't launch, visit our FAQ page here, where we listed all possible solutions..." could suffice for people who just want to play. At least they would not be totally stumped, and would have some options before they also google the problem, but man... Also, maintaining a FAQ about launch issues, bugs, crashes, etc. would be expected for a paid customer to have support for their product...

I somewhat understand that in 2025, game devs can expect everyone to eventually google what they don't know, but an errormessage would still go a long way in establishing a communication with the user in the time of crisis - "Hey, we failed now, but we have some general ide about the problem, here are some general options, and here is where you could seek further help" is an essential part of customers support - even in 2025, and it's so basic, I don't even understand why I am still talking about this.

TL;DR - User loses it over games that don't show errormessages after failing to launch.

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[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Games actually provide lots of debugging information, but not in an easily accessible manner. It is usually printed to stdout or stderr, which is to say, to a terminal output, and you'll only see it if the game executable is launched from a terminal or the outputs are redirected to a file.

[–] Sati1984@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Yes, for you and me, this is useful information. But here is where I think, for less savvy users, even a blanket error would be really helpful, focusing on next steps the user can try.

[–] donuts@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I ain't here to defend shitty game dev practices, but maybe there's no error message because the game can't launch at all? Like, there's nothing to report about because the game never got a chance to load properly.

Have you checked the event log? Maybe that will give you a clue.

Edit: another common culprit is antivirus nuking game files, but that shouldn't happen to games you've already played, so I doubt that's the case. Still worth a mention though, just in case.

[–] SpikesOtherDog@ani.social 4 points 1 week ago

Symantec has watched me execute the same script I wrote dozens times before suddenly deciding that it is malicious.

[–] Sati1984@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Thanks for the tip, and yes, I can do that, I can check logs, but the point of my post is to have some information that a less experienced user can access and get a clue on what to try next.

BTW in the case of RE2remake, the solution was to switch the game to the beta branch, redownload it, then launch it again - it worked, but I only know this, because of a post on the Steam board of the game. Here is where a blanket error would come in handy ("try this, this, and this, then switch to beta and try that, etc."), if there is absolutely no information about the nature of the error.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

But dear gamedevs, please, please, please for the sake of less savvy players, include at least some clue of what the user should do.

Look at the logs. Submit the logs in your bug report. I agree that displaying a message box would alleviate user confusion but a) that won't contain the info devs will need to actually solve the issue, dialog boxes are too small, and a gazillion of bug reports saying "Game tells me 'cannot initialise gfx window'" aren't helpful and b) what if the message box fails to display. I mean technically writing to log can also fail but then the user probably is noticing that their disk is full in some other way so it's not as much of an issue.

The ideal situation is having a secondary process watch the actual game process, if something goes wrong it will give you the choice between displaying the logs and just submitting a bug report. Another uncomfortable truth is that without a tech-savy user at the other side, some bugs just can't be diagnosed because it's a "works on all of our machines, we have no idea how yours is different" type of situation.

...and if the engine you're using doesn't come with that kind of thing built-in no devs won't write it. It's a PITA to do when you're not acquainted with the code that actually does do the basic windowing etc setup and there's more important bugs to squash and features to creep.