[ PC ] Game hangs on loading screen

Posting this in case other people come across the same issue (and to hopefully avoid them having to completely re-install the game)…

Was standing in Assembly, collecting Blessings, game crashed to desktop. Same thing again… no text on the loading screen. On a hunch, wondered if it was some sort of user cache data that was getting corrupted by the crash so…

From the Start menu, typed in %userprofile%
(this is the environment variable that takes you to your User Profile folder)
From the View menu chose Show > Hidden Items

This made the AppData folder structure visible.
From the AppData folder, went into the Local sub-folder.

  • Renamed the Blizzard Entertainment folder to Old Blizzard Entertainment
  • Renamed the Battle.net folder to old Battle.net

Re-started the game from the Launcher, which re-created those two folder structures.
Worked fine.

(Although I had to reset some in-game options, such as sound volumes and so on, acknowledge some in-game tips, which must be held in a config file somewhere in one of those two re-created folders)