I ended up figuring out my issue accidentally through a completely different game telling me that my graphics driver was severely out of date, telling me "The installed version of the NVidia Graphics Driver has known issues in D3D11. Please install either the latest or the recommended driver version or switch to a different rendering API". I have Intel i7-8750H CPU 2.20 GHz. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, but the driver I had was 518-something. But the catch was, my computer and the "Geforce experience" program that should have downloaded and installed the most current drivers weren't actually doing that. So along with repairing FF14's files and having to wait another couple hours to finish downloading, I was also installing a more current driver through their website. Lo and behold the game works again for me. The version I downloaded and installed is NVidia Studio Driver (more stable) version 555.99 . Hopefully that offers some insight to help with trouble shooting. I wish you the best of luck.