Disclaimer: This solution worked for me consistently (as much as I could test it). Please report here whether or not it worked for you.
tl;dr
Launch the game by running World of Warcraft\_retail_\Wow.exe as administrator
Hello everyone,
I returned to WoW retail recently and installed it fresh. Started a new toon, played Legion to 60 and started DF. I think I received the error message in Legion once, but I don’t remember for sure.
None of DF’s cinematics (the real cinematics, not the game engine cutscenes) worked, starting with the “Kalecgos calls Khadgar” (the very first one) - The game freezes for a few seconds and then unfreezes with the error message “This cinematic is not available”.
I had no addons installed. I deleted cache, interface and WTF folders and ran game file verification from Battle.net launcher.
After all of the above failed to resolve the problem, I’ve completely uninstalled and reinstalled the game on a different drive (both old and new installations were on SSDs. The reinstall is on the system drive).
BTW, I’m on an intel i7 gen 5, 16GB RAM, 2080Ti, 1Gb/100Mb internet connection and Win 10.
WoW ran without a problem in previous years on this PC (I didn’t reformat in ages).
None of these solutions worked. Nothing suspicious appeared in the various log files within the Logs folder (World of Warcraft\_retail_\Logs) and the Errors folder is empty.
There was an entry in Windows’ event log, but it wasn’t consistent with all of my attempts to launch cinematics. I think that it was Windows’ notification for when it displayed the “Wait or Kill process” for when I clicked the game window when it was frozen trying the load a cinematic.
Then I though about file and folder permissions. I went to The Seat of the Aspects in Valdrakken. If you haven’t done this quest yet, you can talk to Kurazidaia, take the quest and click “Tell me what happened” to trigger a cinematic. You can also ask to see the cutscene again after you’ve watched it once (whether it loaded or not).
I asked to watch the cinematic and it failed to load with the freeze and error message.
I then quit the game and launched World of Warcraft\_retail_\Wow.exe as administrator.
I asked to watch the cinematic again and it worked!
I quit the game and launched Wow.exe without admin and it worked. It also worked when I launched the game via Battle.net launcher.
This confirmed that it is a permission problem: When running as admin, the game was able to save the downloaded cinematic and index files into World of Warcraft\Data\data, and once it was there, it didn’t need write permissions, only read, to load it.
This is the place where most players should stop reading because following the next steps could potentially cause problems if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Now I wanted to take this a step further because I didn’t want to type in my password every time I launched the game.
I noticed that my Windows user, although the owner of the game files and a member of the administrators group, had no explicit permissions on the files. I gave my user full control over the World of Warcraft\Data\data folder, but didn’t change permissions for existing files and containers (no recursive modification and inheritance) and launched the game via the launcher.
I couldn’t test the new solution with Kurazidaia (or by creating a new Dracthyr) because these cinematics were already downloaded, so I went down the portal to the lower floor to Storidormi who has three cinematics to show. The solution worked (tried before and after changing permissions).
I then took it further and gave my user full control permissions over the main World of Warcraft folder and applied the change to all of the game’s files and folders (recursive and inheritance). After launching and quitting the game, Battle.net “started an update” that reverted this change and set the permissions to their original state.
I verified the solution (of giving my user full control over the “data” folder without changing existing files’ permissions) again by launching cinematics from the menu in the character selection screen (again without and then with the modified permissions). It worked perfectly.
More things I tried that didn’t work:
- Checking the “Run this program as an administrator” box in the compatibility tab of Wow.exe and launching using Wow.exe or Battle.net.
- Running Battle.net as admin.
I’d love to receive comments about whether or not this solution worked for you because I have no more cinematics I can launch “on demand”.
I hope that this solution helps anyone who encounters this problem and I hope that Blizzard fixes it so that everyone could enjoy the game – not just tech savvy players.