Mad Max hanging at ... well, not really the loading screen

Issues & Assistance
1

Howdy, folks.

Anyone else have Mad Max working under Steam on CachyOS? I was able to play it on Arch a few months back, did an upgrade to Cachy, and now I get not so much a loading screen as dumped into the landscape with a movable camera but nothing else. Doesn’t appear to be the live game. I’ve attached a screenshot for reference.

Before I get stuck in the landscape I do first get prompted to select a resolution and have the ability to tweak some other settings. Just no entry to the actual game. I’ve tried a few different resolutions and combinations of setting and, just, nope.

I don’t know that it really impact this but I am on a modern AMD Radeon and the rest of the workstation is fairly beefy.

Oh, because it might matter, I should have some cloud saves and it occurred to me that might be the source of the problem but they don’t seem to be cached in my ~/.local/share directory for Steam and Mad Max.

thx

Screenshot from 2026-06-17 16-20-30
Screenshot from 2026-06-17 16-20-301612×1212 440 KB

2

Probably not a huge surprise for this who are more familiar with Linux gaming but I was able to compare the configuration of the Arch arch install versus the new Cachy install and the significant difference was lack of Proton installed on Cachy. Once installed, all good.

3

Hello and welcome,

But if running within steam it should download/use its own proton as needed so long as Steam Play is enabled.

Some separate/standalone proton package should only be needed if you specifically want some special variant or if you are trying to run something outside of steam (in which case umu-launcher is the recommended method).

4

Again, new to this.

Not sure how Steam does it in stock form. But I installed the Cachy proton package and flipped the game over to Proton Experimental and Bob’s your uncle.