Played without issues since release - since yesterday I get crash at launch

[Gnomecarl]

I pre-ordered the game on Steam, love it, and have played 92 hours with no issues at all. Until yesterday, since when I have not been able to launch the game.

The launcher has some kind of visual issue, it goes blank. The launch button is there somewhere, when I press where it should have been the game starts launching. It immediately crashes and brings up the Paradox Crash Reporter (which btw fails to send the report). The game crashes in the same way if I bypass the launcher and open the ck3.exe manually.

I have tried everything in the fixes master list, no changes. I strongly suspect my problem is connected with updating the Nvidia GeForce driver to version 456.38 (which happened yesterday...). I also peeked in the error log text file and saw something about a suspicious driver state.

 

[satoru]

Definitely some oddness with yoru graphics

I'd maybe try to roll back the drivers. Select the "Clean install" checkbox when reinstalling the drivers

 

[Gnomecarl]

I tried rolling back the driver but at the time the new one was installed the old one was automatically deleted, so I had to re-download one, and I have unfortunately no idea which version I had before. I installed the second to last one (from August), but it didn't work, same error.

Some extra information; my normal preferences force all apps to run on my Nvidia card, but after a clean reinstall I launched CK3 on automatic choice of graphics card and it seems it chose my Intel card and managed to run the launcher properly. Pressing Play, however, results in a small red triangle and the text "Launching game failed". Launching the ck3.exe manually gives the same result as before, immediate CTD after 10 seconds on the loading screen (on both Nvidia and Intel).

Another thing I noticed is that when I manually looked through apps in the Nvidia dashboard with the newest driver I found CK3 but with the exe "titus.exe", not "ck3.exe". Now with the previous driver installed I don't find CK3 there at all. GeForce could not find CK3 on neither of the two drivers I've tried.

 

[Gnomecarl]

I managed to get it to work in the end! By unistalling CK3, uninstalling the driver, then installing the oldest driver available from the Nvidia website (442.19 from March), then reinstalling CK3. Now it works as it did before.

Btw the reason I didn't get past the launcher on the second try was because I earlier had set admin rights in the exe-file's compatibility settings, a setting that persisted after uninstall. The launcher didn't like that much.

Anyway, now we know the newest Nvidia drivers might cause issues for some players.

Edit: I run on Win 8.1 and GTX 860M

 

[BVBrow]

Similiar problem, but ive got the game via GamePass
Pretty weird