PC/Steam – Update 1.1.5 startup crash before reaching the main menu

Hi Bungie,

I'm reporting what appears to be a reproducible startup issue that began immediately after installing Update 1.1.5.

Marathon was working normally the previous evening with no launch or stability problems. After updating, the game now fails on every launch.

The sequence is always the same:

• Steam launches the game normally.
• BattlEye starts successfully.
• Marathon opens to a black screen.
• Before the intro cinematic or main menu appears, the game closes without displaying an error.
• Steam returns to the green Play button.

The issue has now occurred on every launch attempt since updating.

I've spent several hours trying to isolate the cause before posting here because I wanted to rule out as many local issues as possible.

The following made no difference:

• complete uninstall and reinstall of Marathon
• Steam file verification (completed successfully)
• BattlEye repair and reinstall
• resetting Marathon's local preferences
• multiple Windows restarts
• disabling HDR
• disabling both Steam and NVIDIA overlays
• bypassing SteelSeries Sonar
• disabling Nahimic components
• temporarily testing without third-party antivirus real-time protection before restoring it

After every change, the game failed at exactly the same point.

Some additional observations that may help:

• Steam consistently reports the installation as healthy.
• BattlEye appears to initialise successfully every time.
• The launcher starts correctly.
• Marathon itself exits during early startup before the menu appears.
• Windows Event Viewer doesn't generate a normal application crash for the failure.
• DxDiag reports no display, audio or input problems.

System overview:

• Windows 11 64-bit
• Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU
• 32 GB RAM
• Steam

I appreciate that this may not be enough to identify the root cause on its own, but I wanted to provide a report after eliminating the most common local causes.

Game runs fine on my PS5 but sadly not my laptop which is where I want to play please. 

Thanks :)