I just downloaded Dark Souls 3, when I hit "Play", it just stuck on "Launching" forever.
Register DarkSoulsIII.exe as none Steam game and force compatibility mode, it somehow still goes back to launch through official app page and gets stuck again.
Searched online, 2 guys on reddit described the same issue, with Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS and Mint 20.02, while I'm on Fedora 37 KDE.
Weirdest thing, when I hit "Verify Integrity of Game Files", it also gets stuck. It doesn't start nor fail, just infinitely checking something.
Strangely, browsing ProtonDB, I've seen no one had a similar issue. Even someone with exact same Distro had no problem whatsoever.
I don't know what to do now, so I'm asking for help, or just ideas for troubleshooting.
I ran into this with Boltgun (and Remnant earlier in the week). Other symptoms were Steam not actually closing unless I kill -9d it.
From debugging, clearing my download cache got me to the point where it "launched" but nothing happened. Whereas Remnant launched normally. And steam closed normally the first time and then grabbed a crap ton of (presumably) shaders and redistributables. And now I am back to the previous symptoms.
So I assume something is funky with the current version of steam that is corrupting the download cache and I am not going to care until at least the next steam client update.
Just popping back in to say I "fixed" it. Did a bunch of debug logging, figured out it was hanging in failing to install a prereq on the proton side, and confirmed that was another thing that was fixed by clearing download cache. Then thought through what would make that fail.
Turned off "Background processing of shaders" in downloads, full shutdown of steam, start up. Then cleared my download cache, killed all processes again, and logged back in.
So far no issues with any games. My working theory is it may have been a specific proton version corrupting the redistributables that was updated last week or that this is related to preprocessing of shaders not shutting down gracefully.