Anyway, after experimenting with different settings without success, I tried creating a fresh bottle – and that worked. The game in the new bottle launches fine.
That’s good, it’s working now after reinstall. At this point, without logs, it could be anything. Maybe you changed the runner (wine version), or the game received some internal update that went wrong. Without logs, it’s hard to say.
If you want to restore the old bottle state, for the furure just export the bottle and restore it if needed. If you are sandboxing your bottle from internet access, it can’t download the newest Mono (.NET). To prevent that issue, I recommend disabling the sandbox temporarily, switching the runtime to the latest Wine, and if nothing else works—just keep the sandbox enabled and reinstall Mono manually.
Another thing: one directory above the C: dir or in the same level (IDK) there is a cache directory. Try deleting it—sometimes it prevents the game from running.
Whenever something doesn’t work, make sure you are on the newest possible versions of dxvk, vkd3d, and Wine (there are multiple options—if you want “clean” Wine, you can use Kron4ek builds + Kron4ek staging with additional patches or just system wine, though system versions may be outdated depending on your distro).
And one more personal tip: I never advise putting multiple games into the same wine prefix (called “bottle” in Bottles). Tweaking the settings often breaks compatibility: one game works, another stops. It’s much safer to keep one game per prefix.
And if your game doesn’t need DirectX 12, disable vkd3d and see if it helps.
When you switch Wine to a newer version, if the Wine developers have updated Mono or Gecko, Wine will show a popup asking if you want to download them. That happens when your version is outdated or missing.
Thats tatally normal.
For your information, the current version is something like 2.14. But never mind, I don’t think this is related to the Directx3D implementation, wine or Mono if these things did not help. I just wanted to know if everything was up to date, because always is possibility that could help.
Wine is far from perfect and sometimes things just break—sometimes because of a system update, sometimes because of a Bottles update, sometimes due to changes in the prefix settings, game update or just bug in wine causing data corruption.
You’re in a good position since reinstalling actually helped you. That’s not always the case. Sometimes you need to wait months—or even years—for regressions to be fixed.
Appendix
I don’t know how familiar you are with Wine, but for the future remember: dxvk is not the default Wine implementation for DirectX 9–11. By default Wine uses wined3d, which is slower but often more robust. So if something doesn’t work, just try disabling dxvk.
However, in Bottles there’s currently a bug (I think) where to switch properly you first need to change the Wine version to an older one, and then back to the version you actually want to use.
It’s best to enable performance monitoring and check whether the game is running with dxvk, vkd3d, or wined3d to be sure.