Hey all,

I'm running Fallout 4 through Steam. The game's been running great for the last couple days (received it as an early Christmas present a few days ago), but as of this morning, I can't start it up at all. Could really use some advice.

So I run the game, and it brings up a launcher, similar to the launcher for Skyrim and previous Fallout games - where it lets you modify graphics settings, contact support, etc., and then you launch the game by pressing 'Play". When I press play, it closes the launcher. At this point, I would expect it to open the actual game window. Instead, Steam pops up and says "Preparing to launch Fallout 4..." for a couple seconds, then brings up the launcher again. Clicking "Play" here results in the same loop through Steam loading the Launcher and the Launcher bouncing me back to Steam, until I get frustrated and give up.

I've tried verifying the game cache, reinstalling the game entirely, updating my graphics drivers - nothing works, and I'm dead in the water.

Any ideas? I was really just starting to get into the game and now I can't even open it...

Try going into the files, right clicking the launcher, going to properties -> compatibility, then unchecking the "run as administrator" option for both the launcher and the .exe

To get to the files just right click the game in steam, go to properties -> local files then click the browse local files button.

Hope this helps!

I should have mentioned that I actually already have everything set to Run as Administrator - something that I had to do to get some other things working when I upgraded to Windows 10.

That said, I reinstalled the game for a fourth time earlier today (thank god for unlimited bandwidth), rebooted Steam, and suddenly it started working just fine again. Literally did nothing differently than the other umpteen times I tried to reinstall/run the damn thing, but there you go. I'll chalk this one up to luck, count my blessings, and head back to the Wasteland. [shrugging intensifies]