Game won't open main menu

[The Bagman]

Hi, so I bought the game yesterday hoping that most of the bugs had been taken care of. Unfortunately the game won't even start for me.

After the intro videos you're supposed to press enter once and then get a popup informing you about the autosave feature. Afterwards the menu should be visible. In my case this simply doesn't happen, i can press enter once and the background animations start, but other than that the game is stuck like this. No popup, no main menu, just the blinking star in the middle of the screen.

I tried waiting for several minutes hoping that the game might just need some time, but no avail. Unfortunately there hasn't been a single post about this yet save a sorta similar case on the xbone forum, so I tried all general troubleshooting tips without results.

I'd hate to refund HR since I loved the first game, but if I can't even get into the main menu there's no way I wouldn't. Has anyone encountered a similar problem?

[MTL5]

Never heard of this before. PC Specs? OS?

Can you take a look at Game.log in the game's main directory? Maybe upload its contents via pastebin? Also, can you post a screenshot of what the menu looks like when it is stuck?

[bloodylucy]

I assume you already tried verifying integrity of game cache?

[The Bagman]

Yeah, I already verified the cache twice.

Specs: AMD FX 6300 6x 3,5Ghz, 8Gb RAM, Geforce GTX 670,Windows 10 Pro N 64bit.

Game.log: http://pastebin.com/Ya1bPjxa

What I noticed immediately is that the game seems to think that I have Windows 8. I did have that until about a year ago, but I wiped my SSD twice since then.

As for the screenshots, for reference, this is how it's supposed to look like: https://youtu.be/n9GilBdeKSc?t=28s

And the game gets stuck on the screen with the animated star. Album: https://sli.mg/a/8Sp908

There is no "this game uses autosave" dialogue, the screen is black with the star for about five seconds after which the background animation will load. The animation plays normally, so does the star animation. I can't do or click anything during this time. When I press enter I can hear a shot sound effect, but that's it.

[bloodylucy]

Can you check whether the game correctly creates its save game folder (C:\Users\'Username'\Saved Games\homefront2)? Usually, after pressing enter, it should load the gamma setting screen first and save the setting in a config file, so maybe it has issues accessing this folder.

[The Bagman]

There was no save game folder created by the game, I went ahead and created one but apparently still no avail without a config file. Thanks for the help though, the issue seems to be with the saves.

[MTL5]

Originally posted by The Bagman:

There was no save game folder created by the game, I went ahead and created one but apparently still no avail without a config file. Thanks for the help though, the issue seems to be with the saves.

You could try giving homefront2_release.exe administrative permissions. This definitely looks like an issue where the game is trying to write the save files to your HDD, but something is preventing it.

As for the Win 8 thing, that's fine. The game doesn't seem to know any OS past 8. Mine says "Windows 8 64 bit (build 6.2.9200)"

[The Bagman]

Originally posted by MTL5:

You could try giving homefront2_release.exe administrative permissions. This definitely looks like an issue where the game is trying to write the save files to your HDD, but something is preventing it.

That one worked! I had given the .exe admin permissions via properties->compatibility before, but nothing happened there.

Right now I ran it via right click->run as administrator and this time I was prompted to the brightness and main menu. Thanks a lot! Feels a bit strange to run the .exe manually, but at least it works now.

Maybe the underlying issue is permission rights of the game's save file on C:\ when the game is installed on a different HDD/partition.

[MTL5]

Originally posted by The Bagman:

Originally posted by MTL5:

You could try giving homefront2_release.exe administrative permissions. This definitely looks like an issue where the game is trying to write the save files to your HDD, but something is preventing it.

That one worked! I had given the .exe admin permissions via properties->compatibility before, but nothing happened there.

Right now I ran it via right click->run as administrator and this time I was prompted to the brightness and main menu. Thanks a lot! Feels a bit strange to run the .exe manually, but at least it works now.

Maybe the underlying issue is permission rights of the game's save file on C:\ when the game is installed on a different HDD/partition.

Well, that's good news. Just be careful otherwise you might end up playing a few hours and then come back to find the game hasn't saved.