So I installed the game, hit play on the launcher: unspecified error (just gotta love when 0 information is given in the error message. The application not only fails to work but flips you the bird by not even hinting at why.), then nothing happens.
So I try to launch the exe directly. I don’t expect it to open, but maybe Windows will give me a more useful error message. It opens, great, problem solved. There’s a login screen. I enter my info, hit “log in”: game tells me to go ■■■■ myself, why am I trying to use the login provided in the game executable, go use the launcher. THEN WHY IS THERE A FREAKING LOGIN SCREEN IN THE GAME AT ALL?
There are three possible explanations here:
Devs deliberately trying to piss off and drive away new users
The executable at one point having been a valid entry point into the game but the launcher came along and nobody gave the 2 shits necessary to remove the login screen from the executable, aka apathy
Okay, found the issue. I’ll ramble a bit, but it’ll be easy to figure it out from context even before I state it.
In 1999 as a 12-year-old I was studying MS DOS in computer science class. The teacher stated not to use any non-English characters in directory or file names. And for a while I didn’t. Decades came and went and I payed less and less attention to it. Operating systems changed and never once did using characters from my native language become a problem. Until today.
Much like a XX century MS DOS app, EVE Online has a hard time decoding unicode characters. I installed the game to P:\Játékok. Here’s the tricky part: the launcher, when looking for the executable finds the path and correctly decodes it, opening exefile.exe in the background. It begins to launch and tries to open a file, this time failing to properly decode the file path. Launch fails, it let’s the launcher know, which just shows a generic information free error message. When looking at the log nothing stands out since the launcher did find the correct folder. To find out that exefile.exe didn’t I had to launch it from another application so the console output would show up, which clearly showed the issue.
Side note: I didn’t find an easy way to move the installation folder. Cutting and pasting the game files into a new folder does not make the launcher go, “oh, ■■■■, the game seems to have disappeared, do you know where it is, user?” and then a prompt and a quick reconnection of system variables with reality. No, it starts downloading the game from scratch.
I wanted to play this to chill and take my mind off some irl stuff, it turned into 5 hours of troubleshooting. Granted, a lot of that was reinstalling from scratch, but it still feels like I got punished for English not being my first language.