So I tried uninstalling the game on my NVME and reinstalled it on my HDD. It worked for several hours, but as soon as the game closed, I couldn't open it again because of the same issue. Uninstalled and reinstalled again, worked for a few hours. Same crash, no error, just 1/4 window, then nothing. Really hope this gets patched soon.
It's clearly an anti-cheat error. I just don't understand why the d*** thing can't give us a warning e.g. "Please turn off background service XY to run this game", so even when it's detecting false positives we can at least play it.
You don't have to unplug your hard drives physicially. I managed to get a step futher by simply uninstalling and installing the game on my C:/ drive, now it's giving me an Easy Anti Chear error with a generic message and link to a generic help page.
I run multiple operating systems on one drive and another stores the actual data, games, etc.
I had an eerily similar problem with the initial release of doom eternal and it's associated denuvo anti-cheat application. Which was silently fixed a month later.
At the time I believe a potential (but definitely not %100) workaround was to create a hard link to your installation from within the main installation drive.
I don't vouch to understand it, but somehow the boot chain from within the anti cheat system (in this case EAC) gets broken, as if it either did not like what it saw and shadowbanned you, or it simply got lost and did not load all the files correctly. Pile on resources that are destined to be loaded to the graphics card and RAM and it get's real technical real fast trying to authenticate another user's memory space.
One person said removing a stick of memory worked, another via a windows 11 update, removing hard drives, doing nothing at all and simply waiting, etc. Dumb as hell.
You can try to remove and change hardware, but it's a crapshoot, my game still won't boot. silence after the EAC splash flashes twice.
I powered down my pc, removed the M2 Intel optane memory module and disconnected every hdd except for my main ssd and the storage hdd that had 2042 installed on it, booted my pc back up and tested to see if game would boot and it did, i reconnected and tested with all hdd connected and 2042 boots up and works. For some strange reason it has a confliction with the optane memory module, Hope this info can help someone out
