Black screen when set 4K movie quality

Age of Empires IV IV - Report a Bug
1

I just started the game, could set all the settings at the beginning. Then the screen turned black, could only see the mouse cursor and heard the voice from the learning tutorial. No gaming possible. Menu is working, I could quit the game with ESC. Restarted the computer, gaming still not possible. Windows Update and Drivers are all up to date. Any solutions or other people with the same problem? I participated already in the beta, had no problems. Game is preinstalled from Microsoft Store, inclusive 4K pack.

My System:
Windows 11
AMD Ryzen 5950X
AMD RX 6900 XT
Western Digital SN850 SSD
4K Monitor
Settings all max.

2

It’s a bug! I turned the movie quality back to 1080p and the problem is fixed. If I change back to 4K movie I get the black screen again.

3

Can you post a screenshot so the devs can see it?

5

Difficult… because the mouse cursor always gets removed from screenshot and everything else is black. So I can post only a complete black screen :sweat_smile:

But here are my settings. Maybe it’s because I have a 4K Monitor, but without HDR? It’s just an idea.

2021-10-28 (1)
2021-10-28 (1)1920Ă—1080 67.4 KB

2021-10-28 (2)
2021-10-28 (2)1920Ă—1080 64.2 KB

2021-10-28 (3)_edit_330321921998554
2021-10-28 (3)_edit_3303219219985543840Ă—2160 468 KB

6

I tried to reproduce the black screen. I get it only when a video is playing for example before the learning tutorial or during campaigns. If I start a normal game everything works fine.

7

Thanks for sharing this. It sounds like your system may have trouble playing these files. If at all possible, could you delete and re-install the 4K video pack and see if the issue persists?

In the meantime I’ve also forwarded this along for review by our team.

1 Like
8

Same here. Deactivating 4k video pack it works correctly.

1 Like
9

I will reinstall it later today, and will tell if it worked or not.

10

I didn’t found an option to uninstall only the 4K pack in the Microsoft Store. So I deinstalled everything (game + 4K pack). I installed it again and now everything is woking fine. Seems it was something wrong with the preload of the game. Problem solved :+1:t2:

1 Like
11

Hi there! Can you confirm the 4K HDR Video Pack was fully installed when you were seeing this?

13

Hello, I just encountered this bug on a fresh install of AOE IV via Xbox app on PC. Changing movie quality from 4K HDR to 1080p “works” to avoid black screen. Will this issue be ever fixed? It has been more than 2 years since reported…

System: Windows 11 up to date
GPU: RTX 4090, newest drivers
Monitor: LG C2, HDR enabled, Auto HDR enabled (tried both enabled/disabled, no change)

14

So after having the issue on Game Pass (Xbox PC app) version I got the AOE IV on Steam and guess what? It works fine with the 4K HDR movies enabled. This is just ludicrous, AOE, a game owned by Microsoft and does not work on their own platform after 2 years when the bug was reported. And this is not the first time I am having an issue with a Game Pass game, which is not present in the Steam version (had a corrupted save issue with Frostpunk - not present on Steam).