World Builder hangs on startup (solution)

[Kieran]

I had a problem launching World Builder, where it would hang on the loading screen and end up not responding. I'm just posting the solution that worked for me, in case it might help someone in the future.

What made me realize the cause was that while searching online for a solution, I read that World Builder needs Civilization 5 running in the background and will try to launch it through Steam while loading. This seemed to be failing in my case. Then I remembered that I had set the game to launch directly into DX11 mode by specifying "\dx11" under Properties -> Set Launch Options. Clearing this out solved the problem for me.