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Can't Launch theHunter: Call of the Wild (PC)

Drennon Bond
  • Updated

Hi there,

We are sorry to hear that you aren’t able to run the game properly. Please try the solutions listed below, as they usually work for most users. After completing each step, try to launch the game.

If none of the solutions helped, then we request from players to create diagnostic reports to better assist them. We’ve attached a link at the end of the article to help users to generate these diagnostic reports that can 

If your issue is related to an error message often referred to as “Error, D3D Device Lost”, then please see step 15.

1. Ensure your PC meets the minimum specifications for low settings, or the recommended ones for high settings. They can be found here.

2. Verify the integrity of your game files

  1. Via Steam open your game Library.

  2. Right click on the game title and select "Properties"

  3. Select the "LOCAL FILES" tab and click on "VERIFY INTEGRITY OF GAME FILES..."

  4. Start a game session

3. Make sure your Dedicated Graphics Card is running the game (click here for details).

4. If your steam username has special characters or characters that are not used within the English language, attempting to remove them may solve your problem. Please note: it’s recommended to restart steam and the game before checking if this worked for you or not.

5. Make sure that your driver for your sound card is up to date.

6. Check to see if your graphics card drivers are up to date. For users with a NVIDIA graphics card, they will need to check the NVIDIA GeForce Experience and for AMD graphics card users, they will need to use the AMD Radeon Software. If you are using an older Graphics card, it's probably not supported.

  1. Please note: If you are playing with a NVIDIA graphics card, then it’s recommended to disable the setting “Image Sharpening”. To do so, open the NVIDIA Control Panel → Click the Manage 3D Settings Tab → Global Settings → Find the setting “Image Sharpening” and turn it to Sharpening OFF.

  2. If you are an NVIDIA graphics card user and you are using the graphics driver “445.75”, then you may be experiencing an known issue with the NVIDIA graphics card. This has been an issue for many different games and NVIDIA is working on fixing it. For the time being, please manually uninstall this driver then download the version “442.74” from https://www.geforce.com/drivers.

7. Make sure your Windows is fully up to date. Navigate to the windows update center and manually check for available updates. A PC that is not fully up to date can cause issues.

8. Temporarily disable/troubleshoot programs that could potentially interfere with Steam. Most notably:

  1. Turn off Steam overlay

  2. Disable background programs for recording, screen capturing or any game modifying applications.

9. Try running the game in windowed mode:

  1. Open your steam launcher.

  2. Navigate to your library.

  3. Right click on the game title and select "Properties"

  4. Click on "SET LAUNCH OPTIONS", and type in "/windowed".

  5. Start a game session

10. Try changing your “Screen Space Reflections to 'On':

  • If you were able to successfully load the game, then open settings → graphics → set your Screen Space Reflections to 'On'.

  • To do it outside the game, go to C:\Users\USER\Documents\Avalanche Studios\COTW\Saves\settings\STEAMUSERID>settings.json then set "GraphicsSSReflection": 0 to 1

11. Check that your game resolution settings (in game settings) match the resolution of your desktop.

12. If you are using any controllers as of now, then attempt to disconnect them while trying to solve your issue.

13. If you are using multiple monitors, then in rare cases the game may not load because of that. Attempt to disable one in your windows display settings if nothing else works.

14. If it’s not already, please white list the game launcher (theHunterCotw_F.exe) in your security suite. If your security suite has ransomware protection feature (Controlled Folder Access in Windows Defender), then please white list the game there, as well. The game launcher is in your steam games folder, for example: steamapps\common\theHunterCotW\theHunterCotw_F.exe

15. If your issue is error message “Error, D3D Device Lost”, please follow these steps to solve your issue:

Navigate to Documents\Avalanche Studios\CotW\Saves\settings\(SteamID)\

  1. Edit the file “settings.json” with a text editor, then make the following edit:

  • Search for the line that says "DisplayFullscreen": 1 and change it to "DisplayFullscreen": 0

  • Search for the line that says "DisplayWidth: ". This needs to match your screen resolution’s width. For example: "DisplayWidth": 1920, is for a user with a 1920x1080p display.

  • Search for the line that says " DisplayHeight:". This needs to match your screen resolution’s width. For example: "DisplayHeight": 1080, is for a user with a 1920x1080p display.

  1. Save then close the file.

  2. Change the launch options from your Steam library:

    • Right click on the game and select "Properties"

    • Click on "SET LAUNCH OPTIONS…"

    • In the box type: /borderless

    • Click "OK" then "CLOSE"

  1. Try launching the game.

If the issue persists and you are using Windows 10, then, open the Start menu go to Settings -> Update & Security -> Troubleshoot -> Hardware and Devices -> Run the troubleshooter.

16. As a last resort, you can attempt to uninstall then re-install the game from steam,

- If the above did not help, please send us your DxDiag and MSInfo files (in .txt format) and let us know that you have completed all of the above. Check out this article (https://support.thehunter.com/hc/en-us/articles/115007690748) on how to create them.

I hope that I’ve managed to help you with your issue and that you will be able to continue enjoying theHunter: Call of the Wild.

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