Okay, so I ran into this super annoying issue with Cyberpunk 2077. I’d click “Play,” the launcher would do its thing, and… nothing. Absolutely nothing. The game just wouldn’t start. No error messages, no splash screen, just straight-up refusal to cooperate. This was specifically when trying to play “Lucretia My Reflection,” so at first, I thought it was a problem with just that mission. I was pulling my hair out, let me tell you!
First thing I did was the classic “turn it off and on again.” I restarted my PC, hoping it was just some weird temporary glitch. Nope. Still nothing. I even tried a cold reboot, and also run the program as administrator, Still didn’t start.
Next up, I checked the game files. Maybe something got corrupted during a download or update. I went through my game launcher’s “verify integrity of game files” option. It chugged away for a bit, and… said everything was fine. Great. Thanks for nothing.
Then, I started messing with drivers. I figured maybe my graphics card driver was out of date, or there was some weird conflict. I updated to the newest driver, restarted, and… surprise! Still no game. I even tried rolling back to an older driver, just in case the new one was buggy. No luck there either.
At this point, I was getting desperate. I started googling like a madman, looking for anyone else who’d had this specific issue. I found a few forum posts with similar problems, but most of the solutions were stuff I’d already tried.
There were a lot of suggestions, such as :
- Close background applications
- Disable your antivirus
- Update your Visual C++
I did these all, but they still didn’t work.
Then, I saw one suggestion that seemed a little out there: checking my game’s audio settings. Apparently, sometimes Cyberpunk 2077 can get hung up if your default audio device is set to something weird. I went into my Windows sound settings, made sure my headphones were the default, and… lo and behold, the game finally started! I almost cried with relief.I don’t know why the audio settings can fix it.
So, yeah, it turns out the fix was super simple, but incredibly obscure. If you’re having trouble getting Cyberpunk 2077 to launch, especially “Lucretia My Reflection,” definitely check your audio settings! It might save you a lot of frustration.
