Cannot get past first load screen

[ballad]

Dear whoever may be reading this,

 

So I just bought and installed the game (from Steam). The menu starts up fine with no hiccups whatsoever, but as soon as I select New Game, pick a difficulty setting and hit OK, the game goes into an infinite loading screen. It does not crash, per se - I can still alt-tab to desktop and according to the task manager, the program is running just fine. The loading screen, however, goes nowhere, and my only choice is to terminate the program manually.

 

I've tried reinstalling, restarting, running the game as administrator, all to no avail. No matter what I do or don't do, the game does not let me beyond the first loadscreen.

 

I am running the game on an old-ish laptop (Thinkpad T420); i5-2540M, NVIDIA NVS 4200M, 4GB of RAM. I am aware that the GPU is below the minimum specs - however, I would still expect the game to start, or to at least crash, if it was because of that.

 

Any help/insight would be much appreciated.

EDIT: forgot to mention that my OS is Win7 Ultimate 64bit

Edited March 27, 2015 by ballad

[TheGoatMan]

I actually just ran into this problem when trying to enter buildings. have you found away around it yet? 

[Bockrocker]

Having a very similar issue. Game is completely unplayable.

 

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/73056-game-crashing-or-locking-up-after-launch/

[strangerism]

OS is same as mine but never had this problem. Could be some conflict with hardware drivers?

[ballad]

I actually just ran into this problem when trying to enter buildings. have you found away around it yet? 

I actually solved the problem by verifying the integrity of the game cache (under Steam); turns out there were a few MB's of files that had not downloaded properly.

 

I've also heard that updating your GPU driver and running the program as administrator might help.