Without direct support from game developers, it's hard to push to a right direction what to look for. It could be a number of things, like difficulties with detecting a controller, missing read/write permission to somewhere, too long or obscure directory path, antivirus silently blocking something, not enough free disk or ram, conflicting registry/temp files/filesystem/shader pre-cache etc.
These events are expected when starting to play this game:
- Spinning circle on black background
- "Sony Interactive Entertainment presents" logo
- Guerrilla logo
- Spinning circle on black
- Intro movie (unless made progress far enough)
- Main menu
- Spinning circle on black after New game / Continue selected
- Loading screen with background image and gameplay tips
- In game
Based on what you said, I'm assuming that the game gets stuck on that very first step. Also, you seemingly have played this game on your PC before and there is some previous progress involved.
I'm also assuming you're not trying to use any gamesave taken from elsewhere or config modifications that the game itself did not make. Ruling that out makes troubleshooting a lot easier. Regardless, you might want to disable cloud sync from GOG Galaxy settings and try to move your current gamesave files temporarily elsewhere, to see if that makes the game even work in the first place. With cloud sync disabled, reinstalling the game with a checkbox ticked "Also remove my local savegames and user data" may also be worth a try.
If the game doesn't want to work even without any of those pre-existed profile/save files, then the problem is somewhere deeper. Unfortunately the next best solution I can come up with, is to find out does the game work anymore even on a barebones Windows installation. That is:
- All devices unplugged, other than main display, keyboard, mouse, speakers/headphones and ethernet/wi-fi.
- Full Windows reinstall with FULL REFORMAT (Reset PC option may not be enough) for the Windows drive and the game drive. This deletes all your files from those drives, so make sure of proper BACKUPS (preferably from all drives of course). Don't use any special characters on your new user account (try only local account if possible, we don't need/want OneDrive sync for this).
- Only Windows updates and drivers of the previously mentioned devices installed in, this should mostly happen automatically, including GPU drivers. Restart PC when done, multiple restarts may be required between updates/installs.
- Finally, grab offline installer of the game from your web account and install it (preferably to default directory path, or if that's not possible due to size constraint, at least keep the path short and again don't use any special characters); this happens without GOG Galaxy. Then start the game from HorizonZeroDawn.exe from that installed directory.
By special characters I mean other than A-Za-z0-9. I looked up some config file and in Finnish locale I spotted a word K%C3%A4ytt%C3%A4j%C3%A4profiili, which obviously would not work if something like that is not properly decoded.
If the game works at this point, you may proceed with installing GOG Galaxy to enable cloud sync, try the game once more and then do rest of the setups.
Post edited May 31, 2022 by evkj
