"Unable to load area" when starting a new game - possible mod issue

[rebelatnight]

Hello lovely people, looking to see if anyone has any insights on a problem I'm facing rn

Recently, I spent literal days of my life downloading and installing mods for DAO instead of playing The Veilguard (I have it installed, and swear I'll get round to it, just wanted to play Origins first for a bit)

Anyway, I installed all my mods, compiled all the chargen files, booted up the game, made a new character... and then got kicked back to the main menu with the "Unable to load game" message

I've never seen that error on 11 or so years of playing the game, and tried some troubleshooting. I'd been making a City Elf character, so I tried a Human Noble. Kicked back to the menu as well.

Dwarf Noble also didn't work.

Nor did Dalish Elf.

The only origin story that would start was the Mage (both human and elf), so I went back to a few test saves I had from other origins, and they all loaded just fine.

When googling for this error, all the message boards I found for both PC and console suggested verifying/repairing the game, and that seemed to work for most people.

I'm using the GOG offline installer, and that had been recently updated, so I downloaded all the files and re-installed the game, after wiping all previous files and resetting the registry.

(This is a whole 'nother thing, but then the game wouldn't recognize ANY DLC from the Ultimate Edition, so I've spent another day or so trying to fix that, and now I have)

Clean install, no mods, all the origin stories now load and work properly as intended, so I *know* it can't be a game install problem.

TL;DR: Does anyone know of any mods or anything that can cause the game to not load? I think it must either be one of my many mods, or maybe I didn't install one of them properly (throwing something into override when it should have gone into addins, etc). I'm leaning towards that right now as I was going through a long list of mods and just not paying attention, so maybe I installed something incorrectly?

Please let me know, I'd really appreciate any and all help at this point!

 

[theskymoves]

Impossible to give any advice without a complete list of all mods installed. How they were installed (DAupdater.exe, DAO-ModManager, Vortex, DA Modder, etc) may also be relevant.

 

[rebelatnight]

34 minutes ago, theskymoves said:

Impossible to give any advice without a complete list of all mods installed. How they were installed (DAupdater.exe, DAO-ModManager, Vortex, DA Modder, etc) may also be relevant.

No worries, compiling a list of mods now, this may take some time

Also including ones I've removed as I'm going for the sake of completion, and then noting if those were the troublesome ones or not

 

 

[BlickJustice]

Could it be you didn't run the game for the first time without any mods? My advice would be to run the game at least once without ANY mods installed, so that every addins, settings file is created properly in Documents. And once you install mods, the ones in .dazip format must be installed by daupdater (which is the simplest way and uses the installer provided by Bioware) or the mentioned tools. If it's not .dazip, it goes into the override folder, although there have been some mods that stated to install them in Bioware/Dragon Age/modules/Single Player/override/toolsetexport (rare cases, if the author of a mod doesn't say anything about toolsetexport folder, don't worry about that one).

As you said you have a lot of mods, some of them could have conflicts between them- use Duplicate Search Tool at Dragon Age: Origins to see the conflicts and remove/backup one of the conflicting files, it's the safest way.