Black screen after launching the game

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Originally Posted by CaffeinePanda

Daily post - still not acknowledged or resolved

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Thanks for keeping this topic alive.

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Originally Posted by ZeroRaziel

Thanks for keeping this topic alive.

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A few seconds a day is worth it if it even helps one person play :)

Daily post - still not acknowledged or resolved

Daily post - still not acknowledged or resolved

Daily post - still not acknowledged or resolved

Daily post - still not acknowledged or resolved

Daily post - still not acknowledged or resolved

Daily post - still not acknowledged or resolved

I'm done with the thread, perhaps someone else will continue the quest to help the thousands of players unable to play & who are not receiving support/solutions (or at minimum reimbursement).

Good luck!

CaffeinePanda you have done this issue a service. I have checked periodically to see if anything has happened as a result, and am saddened to see this blatant issue approaching on half a year not being even addressed.

Thank you

I'm a Steam user.

I'm having this issue since patch 6.2 (The one they introduced the Island Sanctuary, i believe) and i've tried alot of things to attempt to fix it, but nothing seems to work.

This is the list of stuffs i did it, so far:

Using the "Repair" button on launcher
It didn't work, launcher seems to be okay, the black screen happens after you click the "play" button.

Reinstalling the Game
I did it, twice, one before and another after i tried to use the "Repair" button. Seems not to work.

Reinstalling the Whole Steam
Not only it didn't work, i also had to reinstall all of my other games and reconfigure some of it, manually. Tried to switch to beta version, setting up the FFXIVBoot file to "-issteam". I also tried to use the "Launch Options" on Steam and used the "-autoconfig". NOPE.

Switching between versions of DirectX9 and 11
Nope, same issue.

Turning OFF Steam Overlay
Not only i turned it off, i also did it with Overwolf, Discord and NVidia GeForce Experience. It didn't change anything with the problem.

Installing the latest version of my Graphic Card
It's always up to date, it didn't work.

Reconfiguring the Internet Explorer/Edge
It didn't change anything, even switching values and returning them to normal.

Changing some FFXIV properties values
Tried to change the "CutsceneValue". No luck on getting that to work.

Trying to do small fixes on some programs/System files
Y'know... Firewall, Windows Updates, booting the computer with less functions, Anti-virus checks/disables, Flush/Release DNS, this kind of stuff. Not seems to get the game to work.

The only solution i've found was the one pointed here long time ago, the one you need to close your Steam before clicking the "Play" button. But this only a band-aid to a open wound. It gets tiresome if you happen to get a Lobby Error and had to do this all over again, (Open Steam, Launch FFXIV, Put your credentials, Close Steam on Task Manager, Clicking on "Play" button, check if the resolution is the correct one, if not, had to change on the "Settings" menu).

I haven't contacted the Support because i wanted to try everything to fix this instead of wasting my time with someone pointing out what to do, while knowing i already did it beforehand.

I don't know what to do at this point, besides getting frustrated every time i get a randon disconnect from the game and this problem not getting aknowledged from any FFXIV staff members.

Same issue here, has been going on for 3 days with the nice bonus that even the Force Stop Steam method does.not.work. Meaning I haven't been able to play the game at all. Day 1 I try the usual suspects, update drivers, compatibility mode, run as admin, nada. Day 2, I contact customer support that just redirect me to another email address. We're on day 3 and still no freaking answer.

But don't worry, I did get a mail telling me my sub was running out, thanks Square.

Same Problem here, for more than One Month now.. i can remeber a time where this would get fix asap but i think steam users are not relevant enough to do so.

Hellooo Square anybody there? It has already been 4 months. Stop acting like you don't see this.

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Originally Posted by on9desu

Hellooo Square anybody there? It has already been 4 months. Stop acting like you don't see this.

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oh they can do that and that heavy,...4 months ago (hell yeah,..) i worte an ingame ticket bout that problem...gm told me to wrote direct to SE support with that ingame support number...and guess what? i recived no answer.
yeah se we know you have alot imporant things to do (change color from a single dot ingame),..but HELL!! there r so many people who has this error,..and not only in a specific country,..i gave up! tro wrote in the german forum because....yeah no answer after all..
as ya know we pay for a game that doesnt work propertly..and yes that includes the launcher too,..as fact that so many from us have to kill the steam instance..we have ingame lags..errors..whatever..

so SE stop ignoring us!

I'm back! 6.3 has undone the file renaming fix, so I had to bring this thread up again to re-find the fix (I haven't tried it, am hoping it's a once off fix until 6.35 or 6.4? doesn't appear to be every patch, not the major ones?)

Many of us have been unable to play the game the way others do, for 5+ months. Some of us had a workaround, but 6.3 broke that workaround, so I want to resurface this as the current best workaround (albeit needing to be repeated each major patch it seems).

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Originally Posted by yate

I did some more experimenting, no need to rename/remove steamclient64.dll in the Steam Folder.

Instead, I renamed

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steam_api64.dll

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inside

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<Steam Folder>\steamapps\common\FINAL FANTASY XIV Online\boot

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to

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steam_api64-bak.dll

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That seems to consistently work for me, and it persists through Steam restarting. I'm assuming it will work until FFXIV pushes an update for that file. Again, not sure what the consequences are, but it allows me to play the game without quitting Steam.

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I try it with new patch nothing same shit again thx square enix for 1 more time who dont fix that problem...

Yeah, I also hoped the patch maybe finally fixes something... but nope :/ Still the same issue for months now.

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Originally Posted by CaffeinePanda

Many of us have been unable to play the game the way others do, for 5+ months. Some of us had a workaround, but 6.3 broke that workaround, so I want to resurface this as the current best workaround (albeit needing to be repeated each major patch it seems).

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Damn, i can't believe naming a file would fix the "issue".
It baffles me that the community found the solution for it faster than the support.
Thanks for sharing it.

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Originally Posted by Kyome

Damn, i can't believe naming a file would fix the "issue".
It baffles me that the community found the solution for it faster than the support.
Thanks for sharing it.

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No problem at all! I didn't 'fix' it, but I was committed to keeping this thread alive... it's the only solution that may help the thousands of players who have been waiting 5+ months to play the game :(

Hi everyone! Thank you all for working so hard to keep this subject alive and find different workarounds. I started having this problem just after 6.3 launched.

Same like everyone, Steam player, can't open the game nearly no matter what I tried. What did work for me now was to open the launcher via Steam, log in, shut down Steam tasks and then launch the game. I have tried to remove/rename the steam client .dll but that did not help in my case.

I was shocked to see some of you have been dealing with this since 6.2. That's a very long time, and considering my example could be suggested it's spreading..? Gosh, the Steam integration keeps bringing only issues.

All good now for me, perhaps the hotfix fixed the issue

I still have this issue and the game wont work without deleting the steamlibrary file every single time :(

So I got this problem for the first time after the patch today. I found a solution but not a perfect one - change from regular fullscreen to windowed fullscreen! This is hard to do with a black screen so what I did was edit my FFXIV.cfg in C:\Users\blabla\Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn. Just change the line "ScreenMode 1" to "ScreenMode 2". This is not a perfect solution because windowed fullscreen is worse than regular fullscreen - if you have more than one monitor like me the refresh rate will be the refresh rate of your worst monitor, even if the game itself is on your good monitor, and you also wont be able to use v-sync/freesync/gsync, but at least you can play.

edit: You can probably disregard my solution because my problem was not with the game itself. I did some further testing and I noticed I had the same problem in other games too, and it was easily fixed by rebooting my computer (I pretty much never do it, it runs 24/7 lol)

Hey all,

I've been having this issue also after latest patch..i've logged on fine 2 days ago without any issues..

Last evening I thought I had some time to play but I was greeted with a constant black screen upon launch. I reinstalled the game , cleared my config files, made sure I reinstalled on my C:/, checked event viewer , removed my GPU drivers and reinstalled , made sure all windows updates up to date , checked bios updates , tried the workarounds like messing with steamapi64 , removing all overlays , starting in safe mode - and still nothing...

I just noticed it seems to work on DX9 , but not on DX11..I checked DXDIAG also but no issues. I'm out of ideas.

Does anyone still have this issue anymore?

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Originally Posted by Erendirn

Does anyone still have this issue anymore?

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I guess that most people who posted here before still suffer from the issue. It's odd though that renaming the Steam-.dll doesn't work for you (maybe it's something similar but not exactly the same bug). Have you also tried the first solution people came up with? Verifying your login details in the launcher and then killing Steam in the taskmanager? I can't think of anything else you could try, you did it ALL already. Except for maybe installing the game on another fresh PC-user? It's kinda a hassle but maybe you could at least access the game.

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Originally Posted by LostHope_Saki

I guess that most people who posted here before still suffer from the issue. It's odd though that renaming the Steam-.dll doesn't work for you (maybe it's something similar but not exactly the same bug). Have you also tried the first solution people came up with? Verifying your login details in the launcher and then killing Steam in the taskmanager? I can't think of anything else you could try, you did it ALL already. Except for maybe installing the game on another fresh PC-user? It's kinda a hassle but maybe you could at least access the game.

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Yep sadly already had tried - I found a fix though...!

To anyone still experiencing this, it's indeed Steam itself that was causing the issue, it's simply uninstalling Steam and reinstalling again from scratch - unfortunately I had to remove all my previously installed games also (unknowingly did not backup my Steamapps folder, so make sure to backup your games first :) ).

for good 3 days i write with SE support...and it seems we run in circles...always the same thing,...sending data...trying things that we all have done for weeks...and then again and again....timeloops ftw

I have the same issue since I bought my new Laptop in December and even exchanged it for the same one, because I thought it's a Hardware/Software defect. On my Desktop PC it's working just fine.

I have reinstalled the Game/Steam and even reset the Laptop multiple times. First I thought it's the preinstalled Anti-Virus that causes issues, then I thought it was because I uninstalled OneDrive, because leaving those would start the game.. until it didn't anymore. So, I reset the Laptop again and now it's not working with leaving all pre-installed programs installed, nor with them uninstalled.

Renaming "steam_api64" fixes the issue, but I need to reinstall the whole game with every major patch that updates the Launcher, because simply just deleting the renamed file will not work. I get errors that the Updater File cannot be found etc. pp. This post was the reason why I thought it might be connected to OneDrive, but every other Game installed through Steam works, I don't use the Drive on my Desktop PC either.

Starting FFXIV directly through NVIDIA GeForce works just fine. It crashes when closing, which is also a weird thing, but something I observed.

I have no Admin Right issues, the GPU and drivers are all fine, it's just really annoying, because on the Laptop before it was working without issues and it had the ~same specifications.

A friend of mine also uses the same GPU as me, has no issues at all. I have done every troubleshooting step I could, my friend also tried to help, but they are out of ideas by now as well.

Update: Issue happened again... didn't even install/touch anything since it worked last time (yesterday)....I don't know what to do anymore also.

so i have an answer from SE support (i got several but the last one is important), so if nothing helps reinstall windows, they KNOW that there is an issue and they KNOW that it happend only for a low percent group, and they r not so much like here r postet. and fact is , the issues we have are old issues and patch 6.2 showed them for us,

i have the original email, but only in german.

so there will be no patch, no other thingy because the errors we have are old and patch 6.2 "discovered" and showed them for us.

oh and they dont redone that steamupdate, i told them that i would pay for a pc version, but they dont transfere chars (its impossible), and they cant make your steam acc to a pc version (impossible)

so copy´n´paste of data doesnt work for them, a fix for steam users doesnt work, because there r only a lil few persons who are affected and we should reinstall windows.

sry but definitly they wont change anything, if someone wants that i post that email here i will, but it is in german

btw that renamingthingy with the steamclient64.dll works..but not permanent, after you restart steam it downloads that dll again. so you have to delete it again.

and again email from SE, it is not theyr update that causes the error, it is our soft/hardware

Hi, could you share the email maybe? I'm german and I have the same issue after patch 6.3 and would like how to fix it. I think it's pretty mean, that they do not even adress that problem even when it only affects "few" players in their eyes. I also would transfer to PC version, if it was possible. I'm just sick of that black screen problem. -.-

Thanks for sharing. Yeah, it could be a Windows/hardware related issue. From all the tests it feels like FFXIV Launcher tries to refer to Steam for some data and Steam client calls out to Windows for that data and if Windows doesn't provide that for some reasons FFXIV client just loops with a black screen.
Could anyone confirm if re-installing Windows actually fixes the issue? Doing a clean install is a bit extreme for sure so woudn't expect that many volunteers.
Thing is that even if it does help resolving black screen issue that would mean that there should be a way to fix it with a proper Windows Registry editing.

i write with the support team near every 2 or 3 days,..always the same,..today i should try to run steam as administrator or/and disable steam overlay.

my last sentence was that it is sad that NO ONE ever took a look at this topic from the support team or similar.it is a fact that since 6.2 we have the problem ...and not a "few" this error affect more than enough people but not everyone writes here.

and a change from the steam version to windows is not possible, that what the tec support says,..i answered that it is possible to transfere my char to another server,realm whatever? but not to another account?

i even told them that i would buy a new acc including playtime...

@vantoh you can write me your email as pm and i share my support emails with you.

@zeroraziel reinstalling windows does nothing,..fact is,..SE dont know what the error is, what it causes,..fact is ...we dont have the same hardware,software, even countries and internet providers are different and even windows itself.. a freidn of mine has it on his NEW laptop with windows 11 running, on its old win10 pc it runs perfectly. i have a new systemboard and have that issue,

the only thing that work so far is to delete the steamclient64.dll from the mainfolder of steam. but after you start your steam new..it will be there again. i told that SE too,..but they didnt answer bout it ,.only to disable my client...

sad,..

funfact:

in september i opened a topic with that problem in the german section of the technical support,..and without an answer, or statement from SE it was closed and transfered to the "Closed Questions" topic.

"clap clap clap"

Just starting having this issue yesterday, looked through this forum and tired all the fixes, and nothing

Hi there,

I faced the same issue about two days ago. Here what fix it for me, maybe it will work for you

- Go to Start and type: cmd
- In the search window you should see a program called "cmd"
- Right-click on it and select "Run as administrator"
- In the black window that opens, enter: DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth (note the space before "/")
- Press the Enter-key
- Wait for the process to finish
- Now enter: sfc /scannow (note the space between "sfc" and "/")
- Press the Enter-key
- Wait for the process to finish
- Try the game or restart your pc

Good Luck.

Just had a new steam update and now force closing steam after hitting play no longer works. :)
And still square does not acknowledge anything :)