GAME BUILD #: Version 101.102.33868.0 (#99404) 12936891. I’m not sure which number is the “Build #”. Would be helpful if the game mentioned that. And also helpful if clicking the version # in-game copied it to clipboard.
GAME PLATFORM: Steam
OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 11
ISSUE EXPERIENCED
The Art of War tutorial vids don’t show videos. I tried “Early Economy”, “Fast Castle Age”, and “Rushing the Enemy” and none of them show videos. I assume none of the videos play for any of the other tutorials either
I hear audio as if there is narration to a video, but there is no video showing. Just a blank page (see screenshot)
And if you click a mouse button again while on the ‘video’ page, it just skips the video and starts the actual gameplay where you try and get Art of War medals yourself
I seem to recall videos playing when I last tried these years ago
I was hoping to preview them first to make sure they have good, clear info before I show them to a friend
FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
100% of the time (ALWAYS)
REPRODUCTION STEPS
Click "Learn to Play’ from main menu
Click “Advanced Techniques”
Select one of the tiles, like “Early Economy”
Click “Next” (or wait for the auto-advancing pages) until you get to the video page. You’ll hear a narrator, but no video shows on the page
EXPECTED RESULT
Video to play along with the narration
IMAGES
Don’t worry about the brightness in these. I don’t know why screenshotting is doing that. Just a Windows OS issue, I think.
Hi @Darkness01101
I just tested and couldn’t repro this issue. In the past we had issues with those videos crashing the game for some players but not the issue you mention.
Do you have mods enabled? Could you try disabling them?
Thanks for the report
Changed in-game ‘Default Zoom’ setting to 0% instead of 100%
Changed in-game setting to “Windowed” mode rather than “Full Screen”
Removed ‘SKIPINTRO’ launch modifier in Steam game properties
Removed ‘DEBUGSPEEDS’ launch modifier in Steam game properties
“Verified integrity of files” in Steam
Disabled “DSR-Factors” in NVidia Control Panel > 3D Settings. It was at “2.25x DL”
Updated nVidia GPU drivers for RTX 2070 to the latest (v551.23). I had also updated them a couple weeks ago, so they weren’t that outdated.
And maybe tried a few other things that I can’t remember offhand
I tried different resolutions because I thought maybe the embedded video wasn’t liking my resolution (i.e., maybe it was designed for, like, 1280x1024, but my monitor was 1440p)
Note: For the Auto HDR thing, I’m referring to this popup in lower-right that appears whenever I launch the game:
I turned it off, but the ‘Art of War’ videos still don’t show up
I see other players have experienced the same thing, even a bug reported in this forum before:
I still have this issue. Can others try if you have time and post if you have this issue also? It only takes a few minutes to check/test
Launch AoE2:DE > Learn to Play > Advanced Techniques > Choose a Ttile > Click the ‘Next’ button a few slides or until you get to the slide that should play an actual video.
If the issue occurs, you’ll see a blank book page and/or only hear the audio for the advice and not see the video
I’m guessing many people haven’t tried looking at these vids in years, so I wonder if the issue is more prevalent and the devs just don’t know about it since nobody accesses them
I’d like to watch them
I wonder what codec or whatever is required to play the vids. Maybe I don’t have it
Or if the vids work for you, do you have more than one file in this folder? I only have one file: ..\common\AoE2DE\resources\_common\movies
Answering my own question, I found the folder that stores the Art of War videos. I have to manually go here to view them. Posting for others in case they have the same issue as me:
No, don’t worry about that. It’s a Microsoft thing.
I have an HDR monitor and Windows and/or its screenshot tool loves over-exposing screenshots, related to Windows’ AutoHDR, iirc, which gets auto-used when I launch AoE.
The game looks fine on my end. It’s just screenshots that get impacted. I researched it a year ago and found a more robust answer, but here’s a quick Google search with less detail because I don’t want to research again:
" There are known issues with HDR in Windows 11 that affect how screenshots are captured. When HDR is enabled, certain applications, including web browsers like Chrome, Opera, Firefox and Edge, may not render colors accurately during a screenshot capture . This can result in overly bright or washed-out images."
Edit: Yeah, I actually did the research in my post above, 3rd from the top:
As an update, I also tried changing the default app that Windows uses when playing video files, in case the gamer leverages that. That didn’t.fix.
I made one of my friends buy the game and he really likes it. Made him play the Art of War missions but he’s having an even different issue than you… the video plays and then crashes in the middle. He’s on Windows 11 too
That’a too bad! I wish that could be fixed, too. Definitely something wrong with the game. Maybe the in-game video player codec, licensing, or hardware compatibility is whacked
what might be worth trying is borrowing someone’s else’s pc, logging into you steam acct, downloading aoe2, and seeing if the problem persists on that other machine.
If it does, it’s likely a problem with the game settings. If not, it’s likely a problem with the settings on the machine.
Thank you for testing, Quasibrodo. Good idea. Since I’ve seen other threads on this issue, though, and since I don’t want to burden anyone or spend too much time with such a test, I will just hope the issue can be fixed someday… and will manually view the videos in the directory folder in the meantime
Other threads I saw:
I will continue testing solution ideas as I think of them, too
I have the EXACT same problem, I just purchased this game maybe 7 days ago via Steam. My OS is Win 11. And I can hear the audio but I can’t see the video, I checked the folder path placed here, but I have only 1 video, its a 28 second intro video and thats it.
I have no mods nothing, just installed the game figured I would practice and I just cant see the videos.
EDIT: There was a reddit pos that was tagged in a previous post here, turns out the videos are actually located at
For me, they worked when the DE was released, but now they no longer do. I checked about a year ago when I first saw this thread, and everything worked fine—I couldn’t reproduce the issue then. In the meantime, I upgraded my GPU from a 1060 Ti to a 3070 and performed a clean Windows reinstall. Now the issue is there.
The new vp9 videos for the “Battle for Greece” DLC work perfectly, though. One possible fix would be to have the developers convert the old videos to the new file format and use the new in-game video player instead. I’m really curious as to why the old videos don’t work anymore. I’ve also noticed that they won’t play in the new Media Player until I’ve opened them at least once in the old legacy Windows Media Player. Pretty strange.
WMV is an outdated file format, and Microsoft is clearly moving away from older video playback systems. I strongly believe that the codec is no longer shipped as a standard, which causes the game to struggle to access it.
System: RTX 3070 / Windows 11 24H2
Edit: Nevermind—the intro video (the one beginning with “XBOX Games Studios”) uses the same codec and runs fine on my end. This suggests that the codec is not the issue; rather, there appears to be a problem with how videos are played back specifically after the art-of-war scenario intros.
Additionally, I’ve noticed that the video’s audio volume is tied to the in-game “Sound” volume setting rather than the “Narrator” setting, which it objectively should be since the videos consist mostly of narration and explanation.
Yeah, I wondered about codec, too. Thanks for testing that out and theorizing on it
Could it be how the devs coded/scripted the page to embed videos? Maybe my video card (or CPU?) or something doesn’t like the method they used to do that. I use nVidia GeForce RTX 2070, i9 CPU
I agree. I’ve commented on this before here, where I wrote:
“Side Note: I also I consider the briefing narration as a “narrator”, so I expected its volume level to be tied to “Narrator Volume” in the settings screen. However, it is tied to “Voice Volume” instead. That doesn’t make sense to me… seems like an error. Recommend tying the narrator’s volume for campaign briefings to, “Narrator Volume” in Audio tab of Settings.”
You’re on the right track. While the codec itself doesn’t appear to be the issue, the way the game handles video playback might be at fault.
To elaborate, video playback in game engines typically works like this: a video file is essentially a compressed archive of bitmap frames. When decoded, each frame becomes a sizable block of memory—a snapshot of every pixel at that moment. Instead of decoding the entire video at once, engines generally maintain a small queue of frames and render them sequentially at the appropriate times. This block of memory then needs to be transformed (i.e., scaled to the monitor’s resolution) and transferred to the screen buffer at the correct moment.
In this case, the observation that the screen displays the last frame of the narration at the start of the video—and that this frame remains unchanged (even differing depending on whether you skip the narration or watch it to the end)—suggests that the screen buffer isn’t being updated properly. One possibility is that the narration layer is drawn on top of everything and, on certain GPUs (such as the Nvidia RTX), it might not be cleared or rendered transparently when it should be. Alternatively, the game’s draw loop might be skipping until the match begins.
Without access to the game’s code or a debugger, it’s challenging to pinpoint the exact cause. However, the fact that this issue appears specifically on Nvidia RTX cards hints at a discrepancy in how these GPUs handle the clearing or compositing of screen buffers during video playback.
In summary, it seems likely that the problem lies in the game’s draw loop or in how it manages the transition from narration to video. This is something a developer will need to investigate further using the actual code and debugging tools, ideally on a system that replicates the issue.
Great info, cmfrydos! Thank you for explaining all that. And perfect screengrab vids of the issue. Interesting that it may just be RTX. I wonder if @Kimoizhappy is on RTX, too, or if @Felizon89 could maybe try on RTX in their studio
After you said everything, I went into the nVidia App and tried a few different settings tweaks, but nothing helped. Also tried going to WIndowed mode in the game:
After switching to Windowed mode, it was interesting – I think corroborating what you’re saying – where even though the game was now showing in a small window, when I got to the part where the Art of War video should show, my entire screen went black for a few moments (rather than just the little game window), before then re-showing the little game window which had, of course, video-less narration. That full black screen hiccup/hitch when the game tries to get the video to show up is probably indicative of what you’re saying
GAME INFORMATION
