It's been years and I decided to get back into one of my favorite games, a game I Kickstarted almost exactly a decade ago, and...the fucking cutscenes won't play. I get about two seconds of audio and a glimpse of visuals and then it just goes dead.

Google's dumb AI says this is a known issue but I've been searching this sub and the Paradox forums and coming up with nothing. I've updated my drivers, tried installing open-source codecs, and deleted the profiles.dat file in my users folder, and still nada. I'm pretty sure my PC hardware isn't the issue with this eight-year-old double-A game, so...any thoughts?

I'm having a hard time not being annoyed that out of the million mods out there to add this or that mech to the game, or turn the characters into Pokemon or whatever, not one addresses this. You wonder what the point of a big fandom is if it can't even manage that kind of thing.