After buying Wonderlands, I was stuck with a persistent bug that trapped me on the Overworld at the start of the game. No amount of restarting progress, verifying the cache or loading into other people's games fixed the problem. I was just trapped there, every single time.

When I was watching my partner play the game on her PC I noticed a cutscene started playing when she reached the Overworld, that didn't occur during my playthrough. I also realized that the company logos weren't loading when I started up the game.

Which clued me in; it must be the video not loading that was blocking my progress!

Most applications on your PC rely on something called codec to compress, decode, and display audio and video. In cases where these aren't loading, a codec is probably missing or corrupt. When the initial cutscene that plays when you first reach to Overworld fails to load, it seems to stop further events from activating, making it impossible to progress.

There's a codec file that I've been using on my PC's for over 12 years, called Shark007. Its never failed to load anything I've thrown at it... and installing it on my new PC completely fixed the Overworld soft lock issue for me.

DIRECTIONS:

• Click THIS LINK[www.majorgeeks.com] and download the codec
  
• Other codecs may work, but this is the one I've always used
  
• Install the codec. You shouldn't need to change any settings
  
• RESTART YOUR PC or you may get a fatal error message in-game
  
• Load up Wonderlands, and continue your save
  
• The Overworld video should now play, and you should be able to progress

This should hopefully fix the overworld softlock issue for you, but as with any solution there's 100% guarantees. Let me know in the comments if it helped you or didn't work.

If I was able to help, feel free to give me a shout on other platforms. I always enjoy meeting new people and getting a chance to talk about video games.

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