The game cannot start

Age of Empires II: DE II - Report a Bug
1

GAME BUILD:147949
GAME PLATFORM: Steam
OPERATING SYSTEM:*Windows 11

ISSUE EXPERIENCED
After I clicked “play”, Steam showed that the game started running, and “play” changed to “stop”, but the game did not start loading, as if I had not clicked “play”.
My Steam friend said that his interface shows that I am playing AOE2DE, but in reality, the game is not loading.
Through the task manager, I saw that Steam did indeed start the game and there was game progress in the background, but the game did not load.
If you start a game in the AOE2DE folder, it won’t even start Steam by launching the game. If the game is launched multiple times in the folder, even multiple game processes can be seen in the task manager, but the game has not been loaded.

FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
I have been playing this game for 3 years now, and this is the first time I have encountered a problem where the game cannot start

REPRODUCTION STEPS
Here’s the steps to reproduce the issue:
Click “play” on Steam to start the game

EXPECTED RESULT
The game is running normally

I don’t think this is a problem with my computer. The computer I am currently using, which I bought in June, has better performance than the computer I used before. However, through testing, I found that the computer I used before can still run games, but the new computer will encounter this problem. And as shown in the picture, more than ten minutes have passed, and Steam shows that the game is running, but it is not loading
IMAGE

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2

Hello,

I noticed that your Windows installation is using Simplified Chinese. It looks like Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition may have trouble launching when your Windows account name or system locale uses non-Latin characters.

A similar issue was discussed here: The Game Doesn't Start

And the official Known Issues page mentions crashes on non-Latin systems. As a temporary workaround, you can try enabling UTF-8 support for non-Unicode programs:

  1. Open Settings → Time & Language → Language & Region.
  2. Under Related settings, click Administrative language settings.
  3. In the Administrative tab, click Change system locale….
  4. Check Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support and click OK.
  5. Restart your PC.

If that doesn’t help, you might also try creating a new Windows user account whose name uses only Latin characters and launching the game from that account.

Let me know if this resolves the issue!