This does not appear to use .NET.

This is from testing. If mscoree is builtin, and the mscoree debug channel is enabled, anything using .NET will log some mscoree lines.

Nvapi is an nvidia API not related to .NET.

That could still be the case. It crashed in startup in my testing, but I didn't find an obvious cause.

On my current Manjaro installation I don't even get the splash screen (even on older versions of Proton).
Tested on 4.2-3.

System Info
steam-21970.log

65074.434:0008:000f:err:winediag:nodrv_CreateWindow Application tried to create a window, but no driver could be loaded. 65074.434:0008:000f:err:winediag:nodrv_CreateWindow The explorer process failed to start.

Are you able to run other games in Proton?

Other games run fine for me (Sekiro, Dark Souls III, Conan Exiles etc).

This works fine with current "Proton Experimental" as distributed by Steam 1623850434 experimental-6.3-20210616

The only issue I get now is a WMV error

After clinking Ok, no intro video is played, and videos ingame are disabled as is the video background of the main menu, but the game works otherwise

Hi @kisak-valve !
Thank you for looking into this issue. Below you find the crash log:
steam-21970.log

I used Proton Experimental in this crash log.

My system information: https://gist.github.com/Lamera/24fca30a765bfbae42815e94f06c029f

Let me know, if I can test something.

Oh yes! Didn't realize that. And there's also a new driver version. I updated my NVIDIA driver and rebooted my system. Restart the game and ... I can see now game content, but it freezes before the menu appears. Oh, and the background is green instead of a video/image. Strange:

Here's the new log:
steam-21970.log

Hi ! i'm bumping this issue as i've the same problem as @maximepires4 , but this seems to be rather unrelated to proton as i know this game worked before. Something to do with a system library? Log attached, of no interest im afraid.

steam-21970.log

Something to note is, while the game is frozen, a thread is maxed.
Ive tried serveral disable fsync, esync to no avail.

Hey, I have the same problem where the game freezes shortly after start (for proton 9 and newer).
Unfortunately for me the workaround @Lamera mentioned did not work.

When trying the start options with proton 8 or 7 (or 6) I get a window with a title that seems to say "Schwerer Fehler" ("critical error") and the text "No SteamClient021". See screenshot:

I'm not sure what else I could try and would greatly appreciate any help I can get. Here is a log (created with proton 8.0-5 and the above mentioned start options):

steam-21970.log

And here is a gist with my system information (hopefully it being in German is ok?): https://gist.github.com/Ticmea/f7c73b038cce542e3063e7e81c964351

Same as Ticmea here ! And I guess it should be official as it's an officially supported title on steam deck.

The game now works flawlessly

Since the re-release on steam, you don't need any tweaks to play the game.
Just run it without forcing any compatibility tool, the default proton is fine.

If you have issues with the fullscreen, try using proton-ge.

@maximepires4 The reason I landed here in the first place is precisely because that did not work for me.

I only bought the game due to the re-release (was too expensive beforehand due to having short supply). Unfortunately the default settings produced a freeze like 5 seconds after launch. So I went to protondb which lead me here and I tried the things recommended here. As I have said, this produced the error window described in my other comment.

I believe I may still be able to play the game if I boot into Windows, but that is of course not ideal and I would much, much rather play it on my main OS like all my other games.

@Ticmea sorry for that, I rushed to my conclusion since i've been trying to run this game for years.

First of all, the game didn't work for me with older versions of proton, like 7 and 8. So this seems to be a dead end.

Try using proton-ge, I'd recommend ProtonUpQt to install newest versions of proton-ge.

Maybe give us a log using newer versions of proton or proton-ge ? And let's see what we can do from here.

It will definitely work on windows, but as you said this isn't what we're looking for.

@maximepires4 I tried the older versions and startup options after the defaults failed because here and on ProtonDB it was described as a working solution, but yeah it seems that's no longer the case at least for some users.

Thank you very much for the suggestions! I'll look into them as soon as I can and report back. Hopefully I'll find the time to do it sometime this weekend.

@Ticmea I don't know if this is going to be of any help, but I've read across the internet that the error "No SteamClient021" is caused by a call to an outdated steam api. You can check on steam, Help -> About Steam -> Steam API Version. For me it is "SteamClient023". Maybe older proton versions try to use an outdated version of the steam api. (I also had the error No SteamClient021 when trying to run the game with old proton versions)

@maximepires4 I managed to find the time for a couple of tests today. In case it's relevant, here is how I performed these tests:

1. Launch the game with the settings I wanted to test
2. Wait around 15 seconds for the Loading screen to show up
3. The game freezes almost immeadiately upon entering the loading screen (loading animation stops; steam overlay does not work anymore; the Game seems to keep a single CPU core at 100%, seemingly not doing anything with it)
4. The OS eventually tells me the program is not responding (I always waited for this to happen)
5. I use steam to forcefully quit the game

I noticed that Steam downloaded an update for RUSE (or possibly proton? Not sure but it listed RUSE in the downloads at least), I wanted to try completely vanilla settings. So I did but I ran into the same problem (freeze during initial loading screen). So I made a second attempt where I only added PROTON_LOG=1 to the launch options and everything turned out the same. Here is the log file from that attempt, it appears to have been using proton experimental-11.0-20260506b (I didn't force a particular version, just gathered as much from the logfile):

steam-21970.log

Next I wanted to use the newest proton version to see if that made a difference, so in addition to enabling logs in the launch options I forced proton hotfix (which I assumed to be newer than experimental?). From the logs the exact version appears to be "hotfix-20260429-cd-hd2". Here is the log for this attempt:

steam-21970.log

During this attempt I also made a screenshot of the CPU usage graph in my system monitor which shows that at first there is normal CPU load but exactly when the freeze happens, the Game seems to only be using one core at a time but max that core out completely (I assume the OS is making it juggle cores to balance the load somewhat. I can also hear the fans of my PC spinning up after the freeze, presumably due to the maxed core):

And finally I also tried downloading the newest GE-Proton via ProtonUpQt as you suggested. So I installed GE-Proton10-34, selected that in compatibility and ran into the same problem. Here is the log file for that:

steam-21970.log

CPU usage also looked pretty much the same:

I think you are correct about the older versions using an outdated Steam API version. At least mine also reads "SteamClient023".

Thanks again for your help, hopefully there is something usable in the logs. I tried to look into them a little as well, but unfortunately I didn't understand too much as this isn't exactly my forte.

@Ticmea I launched my game with the logging argument, and I can confirm that the default proton version used is proton hotfix, exactly the same as yours in the second file.

The only difference between our setups is that i'm using gamescope with the following launch options: gamescope -f -W 1920 -H 1080 -- %command%.

I think you might want to try gamescope, especially since you seem to have a custom resolution on one of your screens.

However, the gamescope package is not currently available on Ubuntu 24.04, so you'll need to build it yourself. You can refer to this link, which I used to install the package. Just a quick tip: don't forget to run git submodule update --init before the meson command. This step is mentioned in the gamescope build instructions but is missing from that Gist, I don't know why.

I was able to launch the game using game mode instead of desktop in Bazzite.
So definitely a compositor issue.

@maximepires4 Sorry for the late reply, but I was very busy. Today I finally managed to set some time aside to try gamescope.

I did have to reset to an earlier commit like some comments on that gist mentioned but I was eventually able to build and install it. At first using it was causing the game not to launch at all for some reason. After 2 restarts though (just one wasn't enough somehow? idk, don't ask me) it did eventually seem alright.

I was able to play the tutorial and that was working perfectly. So then I decided to play a quick online match (just to test if that is working), expecting to get curbstomped immediately when I entered a 4 player ffa with all 3 other players at level 100.
Thankfully I was left alone long enough to enter the endgame but due to my inexperience I was unable to actually mount much of a defence when eventually I was pushed (60+ minutes in).

Up until that point everything was working 100% as expected. But when I eventually got so desperate that I decided to just send everything I had into the field, it appeared to be working shockingly well (I was fully expecting to be defeated within the next 3 minutes). Eventually I noticed that the enemies (who did chat with me until like 2 minutes before I noticed anything odd) were completely silent and gave no orders to any of their troops (which is why my attack was working).

So I managed to kick the player I was fighting out (destroyed his last HQ) but then noticed that actually the player opposite to me began moving some troops again. So I sent my army to fight them but after about a minute of an even-matched fight, he suddenly capitulated when the fight was far from over. The third player was also not moving any troops and I was able to win the game essentially for free. I even received the achievement for beating a dev (or a player who did) and I received an insane amount of exp too (I reached level 59 from just one match, surely that's not normal right?).

It really seemed strange to me, like surely they wouldn't all abandon the game at the same time? I thought maybe I got a disconnect, but I didn't notice any connection difficulty messages about myself (although there was one for the player who eventually capitulated in the even fight) and the game played like normal for me.

So yeah I'm explaining all of this because I'm not sure if that was:
a. the game working as intended and everyone just essentially let me win (or I got disconnected without me noticing and that's how the game deals with that)?
b. the game encountering some kind of bug and this is just how it behaves then?
or c. something about this setup with linux proton and gamescope that caused this behaviour?

What do you think?

In any case the game appears to be running normal for the most part. Huge Thanks for your help!!! :)