Here is the solution that worked for me: Uninstall EA App, Wild Heart and Steam, create a new administrator account and reinstall EA App, Wild Heart and Steam. After you uninstall EA App, just to be on the safe side, remember to go to the root folder (mine is at C: Program Files/ Electronic Arts) and delete the whole empty EA folder.
To create a new administrator account on your PC (Win 11), go to Start--Right click on your avatar--Change account settings--Family & other users--Other users (you may try "your family" but I prefer "other users")--Add someone else to this PC--Enter a Microsoft email address which is different from your main account--Add the new email address as a new account and make this account as an Administrator.
After creating the new administrator account, log in to this new account and download Steam. Then download and reinstall Wild Hearts through Steam (check the box to create a desktop shortcut for the game).
After the installation, use the shortcut to run Wild Heart. Steam will ask you to download EA App, follow the instructions and install EA App, and the game will continue to run.
Wait for a few seconds and you should be able to see the loading screen of Wild Hearts now.
I don't know the mechanism behind the account trick, but it did work for me. Hope it also works for you.
My wife is unable to run WH (purchased via EA app/ non-steam install) on her windows account (Admin), but WH will run on the same PC with my windows account (Admin account that installed windows). I did a ton of troubleshooting and this just seems bizzarre. Why would what account is trying to run the game have any bearing on whether it would run?
If I try to run it on her windows account, we get the odd behaviour of WH sitting in the taskmanager and using up 400mb of ram, but not actually being playable. She also has no KoeiTecmo folder in her documents. If I log out of her windows account and log in on mine, sign her into the instance of the EA app on my account and launch the game, it starts right up. All programs and services are installed as system-wide, so I have exactly the same background processes running as her account.
This is baffling. We ran thru all of the recommended steps from EA to no avail. Why does this work?
EDIT: Running the EA app as administrator seems to have rectified the issue. Once the game successfully launched, removing admin privileges from the app still resulted in the game launching. I'm not sure what changed since the last time I tried it, but progress is progress.
