Lord of the Rings Online Forum

So I have an M1 iMac, with fully patched Big Sur, and Crossover 20.0.4. So far, I am unable to get LOTRO to actually launch. I am able to get to the launcher, I can log in. I can hit "Play". I get the dialog asking me if I want to use DirectX 10 (or 11 if I have it set to use the 64bit client). No matter what I do, the game doesn't actually run. After I respond to the DirectX version dialog, there is the briefest glimpse of a new app running in the dock (and I could swear the screen flickers for an instant), then nothing. I've seen other reports of a black screen, but I don't even get that.

I have checked my userpreferences.ini files. I've set the gameclient to both 1 and 3, with no effect (other than setting it to 3 causes the DirectX prompt to be about version 11). I've set the Resolution value, I've set the WindowedResolution. I've set my screen's resolution to the lowest possible. I've installed DirectX for Modern Games into the bottle. I've ensured I'm in a brand new Windows 10 64bit bottle.

Not sure what else I could try.

Quick update. Decided to try downloading EasyRes from the app store. Hadn't tried that sooner as I figured it didn't do anything I hadn't already tried by changing the screen resolution via System Preferences.
Well turns out that setting the resolution all the way down via EasyRes, starting the game, setting the options in the game to use FullScreenWindowed, exiting, then setting my display back to normal: that worked.

So the key really is to somehow force your screen resolution super, super low first. Weird how putting those same options in the ini files manually didn't seem to work.

Hi, Eric! I'm glad you resolved your own problem.

LOTRO defaults to FullScreen and doesn't handle Mac "retina" resolutions very well. Until you can get into the game to set the screen mode to something other than FullScreen (FullScreenWindowed or Windowed) and/or get the game's output resolution to match your monitor resolution, you will get an apparent failure to launch the client after hitting PLAY in the LOTRO launcher application. There can also be permissions requests which, because of the default into FullScreen, you can't see and therefore can't respond to which can also cause the game to hang. And unless you manage to pull off one of the "tricks" – such as the one you did – you can't get into the in-game options to do those things, so it's a bit of a catch-22 for most people who assume it should just work. Sometimes even creating or editing ~/Documents/The Lord of the Rings Online/UserPreferences.ini and ~/Documents/The Lord of the Rings Online/UserPreferences64.ini files won't do the job because the game process running within the WINE preloader application doesn't have permission to access your ~/Documents folder.

For anyone else experiencing this common issue, check out Message #3 of this thread at the LOTRO forums where I provide a pretty fool-proof procedure which doesn't require setting a 1x, super-small resolution and shows some of the bottle settings and other things that should be done to ensure LOTRO will work in the Crossover bottle:
https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?687419-Mac-Crossover-Issues-(Abby-Nicole-Continued-)

It can also be valuable to read through this very long thread, although Message #17 describes the most important information:
https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?684532-Success-with-Crossover-20-and-MacOS-Big-Sur-11-0-1