Dragon Age Inquisition crashes on startup (Win 7)

[Pretzel_Hyena]

I just picked up DA:I GOTY, and when I try to launch the game, a black screen (sometimes the DA cursor as well) pops up for about five seconds and then the game closes.

I know there's several posts about this, but I've tried many of the fixes and none of them have actually helped.

I have AVAST antivirus, but I've already put in exclusions for the Origin, Origin Games, and User Origin files.

OpenAL and DirectX are up to date.

I've tried running as admin.

And I'm at wit's end.

[Leora85 · Accepted solution]

@Pretzel_Hyena Did you put in exceptions specifically for Dragon Age Inquisition and the Dragon Age Inquisition folder in Documents > Bioware?

If you have done that properly and you're still having the same issue, a dxdiag might help us figure out what's going wrong. You can find instructions on how to generate and post a dxdiag report in the spoilered section of this sticky.

[Leora85 · Accepted solution]

@Pretzel_Hyena Did you put in exceptions specifically for Dragon Age Inquisition and the Dragon Age Inquisition folder in Documents > Bioware?

If you have done that properly and you're still having the same issue, a dxdiag might help us figure out what's going wrong. You can find instructions on how to generate and post a dxdiag report in the spoilered section of this sticky.

[Rand207]

A dxdiag would greatly help track down any hardware related issues.

Have you tried running the game from a desktop shortcut and right clicking to run as admin (as opposed to running as admin from within origin?  I'm finding that I have many fewer game issues in general by using shortcuts, as opposed to starting a game within Origin (the same with any of my games within Steam or GOG).  If you try that, you will also need to create an exception for the shortcut in your AV.  May or may not help, but I find this works for me so I thought I'd mention it.

When the game initializes, is your black screen full screen, or only a portion of the screen?  I run in full screen mode, but when I start DAI, I get a small black screen (about 1/10 of the size of my screen) in the upper left hand corner.  I click on that tiny black screen, and it immediately goes to full screen with the Bioware logo, and then continues to load without issue.  I'm running Win 10 (as opposed to Win 7).

[Fearmos]

This advice has solved my problem. I have put in exceptions specifically for Dragon Age Inquisition and the Dragon Age Inquisition folder in Documents > Bioware and everything is working properly. Thx