Overwatch 2 not launching, stuck on playing now. strix soundcard / sonic studio fix

Technical Support
1

Hi,
I’ve had issues with running OW2.
When pressing play in battle it sometimes worked but most of the times it didn’t.
It would just stick on playing now without pop up screen etc.
I noticed task manager using the wait chain mentioning the process was in deadlock.
Searching the internet this pointed me to drivers and updating where possible without result.
Reinstall, empty cache folders, turning off AV, DPI setting, etc. nothing was consistently working.
After a lot of trial and error and even trying to use windbg it was hopeless to find a solution.

I came across some post somewhere (cant find it) mentioning something about sonic studio, which is installed with my strix soundcard.

Exiting that program before lauching OW2 was an instant fix !
If I have the sonic studio application open, OW2 got stuck and had to kill it in task manager.
If I close sonic studio application before and run OW2 , it instantly launches.

I think there might be an audio mismatch where OW2 is trying to manipulate the soundcard but get blocked by the sonic studio application.
Why it sometimes does work…I don’t know… maybe the sonic studio software crashed aswell and didn’t notice it ?

It appears to be working now and I wanted to share this.
I can imagine there are other programs creating virtual 3d etc, that might have the same issue.

Happy gaming !

2 Likes
2

I don’t usually comment but I wanted to say thank you PsychiC for posting this!

I’ve been facing the exact same issue since OW2 launched and it seems to be running Sonic Studio II in the background which caused the process to deadlock. Did not have an issue prior running OW1 with the exact same hardware/software configuration (also an ASUS board, MAXIMUS HERO VIII).

Blizzard devs, please take note and issue a fix if possible. It was a coin toss for the last two weeks wondering if the game would launch or not after countless support articles and fixes such as reinstall, repair, clear Battle.net cache, etc.

Hope this helps anyone else who stumbles upon this post.

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Just wanted to quickly thank you for the thread. Had the same issue, was getting desperate to fix it and it was indeed the Sonic Suite (found as SSUI in the task manager).

Thank you for sharing your fix!