Up until this most recent Saturday, I was having no problems playing ESO. In fact, Saturday evening I had just rolled a new character, got to play it for a little bit before deciding that it was late and I should go to sleep. Sunday morning rolls around and I get up, take care of some things and then go to login. Since I knew I was planning on playing again in the morning, I left Minion, TTC, Discord, and the ESO Launcher running so that I could simply hit PLAY and go.
That was when it all went wrong. I hit PLAY, I heard the usual noises from the Developer/Publisher splash screens, but had no game video, I was still looking at my Windows desktop. The client never showed up on my Taskbar. I tried Alt+Tab to see if it was just minimized but nothing new was there. I opened Task Manager, ESO was not an Active Program except as a listing item beneath the launcher when the launcher was not minimized to the System Tray, otherwise it showed up as a Process only. Thinking that it just glitched, I right clicked and closed it. Tried again, same thing. Closed it through Task Manager again, closed Minion, Discord, TTC, and the Launcher. Tried opening only the launcher, same results. Restarted the computer and attempted again. Same results. Tried the Repair Game feature, same result. Double-checked that I had exceptions in the firewall for ESO and its Launcher. Checked my Windows Updates, my Graphics driver, same results. Tried bypassing the launcher and just opening it with ESO64.exe, same results. Ran malware and virus scans, same result. Finally I took drastic measures, I hit Uninstall in the games Launcher and then started reinstalling the game. I did not attempt to delete anything else, just the basic Uninstall. It finished Reinstalling sometime during last night, a bit over a day since I had started downloading again. Tried launching it without opening Minion or anything else. Same result, I could hear the startup splash screen sounds, but never actually saw any hint of the client opening beyond a Windows Task Manager Process.
While I have not disabled Add-ons prior to launching the game, largely because I forgot to try that method and am not at my PC at the moment, I am getting quite frustrated. As near as I can tell, checking my updates history for Windows, there were no new major updates to any part of my computer, the add-ons or the game between the time I was playing Saturday night and the time I attempted to play Sunday morning other than a pair of anti-virus updates. Yet I cannot seem to effectively launch the game client anymore. I am receiving no known or at least visible error messages. I even tried running Game Consultant in the ESO folders hoping that would provide some insight, but it was both dry and over my head.
As near as I can tell, everything should be working fine. So my question is this, Does anyone have any clue about what the heck is wrong with the game that I can click PLAY on the Launcher, hear the sounds of the game client starting up, but never actually see the game or evidence that the game is running beyond those sounds and a task manager process?