Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Failed to initialize the GUI (Crash upon launch)

Upon launching the games crashs and tells me "Failed to initialize the GUI. If you are using mods try uninstalling or updating them."
I've never used mods and I actually haven't played since Patch 4.

I kinda expect a hot fix, since the Patch is pretty recent, but I was wondering if this is a wide problem or something specific because I couldn't find anyone describing this same problem in here.

Thank you.

I had the exact same issue! How do I fix this! I've never used mods before.

Did you do a "fresh" install for patch 7 or did you update from patch 4 to patch 7?

Are you using Steam, Stadia, Galaxy, etc?

Do you have the latest graphics drivers?

I probably can't help you but the more info you provide the better your chances of finding a solution. Good luck.

I did a complete fresh install. I uninstalled the game first, and then reinstalled. Using GOG Galaxy. I have the latest Nvidia drivers, 511.79. I even tried clean installing those drivers too. Didn't help.

I was using a fresh install. Also am playing on Steam.
And yes. I've recently updated my graphics driver.

I'm not particularly good at this stuff, but I tried all the obvious stuff before coming here.

At least I'm not the only one having this issue, which means it's not exactly at my end. lol

I was having a bunch of graphical issues (on fairly new hardware) when I selected Vulkan on startup. Do you still have the same problems when you boot with DX11?

Yes happens to both DX11 and Vulkan

I even tried running it with both Windows 10 and Windows 11, my windows 11 install is very slim and has nothing else running in the background

OK... I completely uninstalled AGAIN. and this time i also said delete my saves. Reinstalled AGAIN. And now it freaking works....!

This makes some sense.

When the game starts it checks your saves so that it can prepare the "Continue" option in the initial menu.

The program likely does not recognize that the save is from a different version and tries to load data that doesn't work anymore. Specifically, the new interface changes. This is just a guess.

Although, I did a test where I reinstalled (patch 6 was still installed) with patch 7 and the menu did appear but showed my old saves grayed out. When I started a new game, after the initial cutscene, all I could see was black and the map with 4 markers. It was definitely messed up. Then I deleted the game folder in Documents, uninstalled, then did a fresh install. I'm sure I missed more folders to delete, though...

Patch 9 and this issue is still occurring between major patch updates. Maybe a check for the older appdata and game save data from steam cloud could be done to prevent it messing up newer versions.