https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46579
--- Comment #2 from Matteo Bruni matteo.mystral@gmail.com --- I debugged this one, essentially it's a case of a buggy game that previously worked on Wine because of two Wine bugs cancelling each other out.
Since 3d6eb8cf1dc1e509a74f85fd2356c6946372ecc5 Wine started to reject the game's attempt at creating some D3DUSAGE_AUTOGENMIPMAP D3DPOOL_SYSTEMMEM textures. The game gets confused by that and later on it "forgets" to create some D3DUSAGE_AUTOGENMIPMAP D3DPOOL_DEFAULT textures that are used in the intro.
It turns out that Wine's behavior is correct, as the tests we already have show, but also that on Windows the game doesn't attempt to create those D3DPOOL_SYSTEMMEM textures at all. Before creating those SYSTEMMEM textures, the game calls CheckDeviceFormat() with a D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8 adapter format, which is never supported on Windows but currently allowed by Wine. If I patch Wine to return the expected failure result, the game starts to take the same code path as on Windows and the intro shows correctly.