Game launches but then minimizes to desktop
I have all updates installed and was able to play the game just fine until yesterday. I can open the EA App, I select 'Play' on The Sims 4, it appears as though the game is preparing to launch by going into a black screen, but then the game minimizes and my desktop appears again. The EA App is closed/running in the background. The game icon is in my bottom tray and from my task manager it looks like the game is running - it's eating up the usual amount of memory. If I click on the game icon in my toolbar tray, it goes to a black screen and then appears to close/minimize itself again. I have to end the program via the task manager in order to close it.
Here are all of the steps I've tried already: I updated my drivers, I removed all mods, I removed the entire Sims 4 folder out of my Documents folder in order to get the game to generate a clean folder, I repaired the game through the EA App, I disabled the in-game overlay, I made sure my antivirus software (Norton) wasn't blocking the game, I even disabled the antivirus firewall entirely just to see if I could get the game to open that way, I completely uninstalled and then reinstalled the game and all packs - nothing has worked. I don't know what could have changed since like I said I was playing it just fine less than 48 hours ago...any tips would be appreciated greatly.
@scientiamemoria Launching the game in windowed mode would have been my next suggestion too. If you don't want to use the command box, you can instead go into Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 4, open options.ini, and set fullscreen to 0 (zero), which is the same as changing the in-game option with the other graphics settings.
This is not an uncommon problem, and some players find that they can return to fullscreen after launching the game once in windowed mode. I don't know exactly what causes this issue, but I do see that your monitor runs at 4k, higher than the resolution the game would apply by default, and that you've set DPi to higher than 96 (100%). These separately or in combination might cause some sort of conflict that Sims 4 doesn't know how to resolve into a working fullscreen game window. Windowed mode gets around the problem because there's no scaling involved: one in-game pixel corresponds to one pixel on your screen.
Anyway, see if you can now play in fullscreen, and if not, you can use windowed borderless to (probably) get the fullscreen effect without this problem.
