SOLVED At a wit's end with crashes, freezes, and other issues. Please advise.

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At a wit's end with crashes, freezes, and other issues. Please advise.

Hello, there. This post might be a bit long, but I'd appreciate it if you'd stick with me, cause I'd really love to do this second playthrough in peace. Thanks in advance.

System specs first: i7 3770 3.90GHz | 16GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM | MSI Gaming X 1070, +120MHz OC | 1080p @60fps, all settings on Ultra, Hairworks On.


I've played through the base game plus Expansions once, and that was without any major issues, or crashes, or bugs, or anything like that. Great experience, 10/10.


Recently, I decided I wanted to play through the entire thing again for a second playthrough with different choices, and all that stuff. So I did, and about 10 hours into the new save, I remembered that I had messed up an interview question with Voorhis at the beginning and decided to restart my new playthrough. So I did.


Alright, so here it comes. For this second playthrough I decided to mod-up a little bit. So I got Friendly Meditation, Extended View Distance, Better NPC Faces or whatever it's called, Main Menu Animator, Nitpicker's Mod, Toussaint Bright Interiors, Volumetric Clouds in Skellige, HD Reworked Project, Disabled Story Book Intros, No Dirty Lens Effect + No Water Droplets on screen, Hair LOD increase, and that's it. So nothing too major in terms of changing the game, just minor cosmetic stuff, with a little bit of housekeeping.

Alrighty, so, up to this point, I had not been getting any issues with any bugs or anything like that. All fine and dandy, these first 10 hours or so were going all just fine, aside from the fact that I had messed up the interview thingy. No worries gameplaywise. Cool.

Here's where things start to get stupid. A few hours into my new new save, weird stuff starts to happen. Mind you, this time around (in this new new save), I'm skipping every possible dialog and cutscene by mashing X all the way through, while still going through all the dialog options, to rush to where I'd gotten in the new (just new) save (which is at the Whispering Hillock sidequest, btw, with all the ? marks done and looked at for lower pretty much all of Velen).

Now, while doing this frantic mashing-X-on-everything playstyle, I got a few weird game moments when I was with Keira where the story wouldn't move forward after I'd done what I needed to do, because I guess I sequence-broke some timing-related thing. So I had to restart that instance and not be so frantic, I guess, and off I went. This is still all fine and good.

And here's where I'm starting to lose my mind. After a few more hours of playtime, I have a couple of instances where hitting enemies triggers these couple-second-long hitches each time I hit an enemy, which only goes away when I restart the game. That's happened a few times, like three in total on this new new save.


What is a huge deal, though, is that I've been getting tons of issues with the game freezing and the only solution is to restart my computer. For example: when I clear an Abandoned Site, and the screen turns to black to fade onto some villagers walking back into their village, I've had a few occasions when this black screen would never go away. Ctrl-Alt-Esc / Ctrl-Alt-Delete did nothing aside from making my mouse cursor appear on the screen. I also tried to do "Always on Top" thing on Task Manager. Didn't help with these issues, still had to fully reset. The other issue that did happen a bunch more, is sometimes when opening either the Select Menu (main menu ingame), or the Start Menu (line menu with Bestiary, Crafting, Map, etc), they'd not have any info on them. So the Select Menu would just pause the game with no menu options showing up - and the only way of getting out of this would be to grab the mouse and right click somewhere, but the menu would be broken until the game is restarted -, and the Start Menu just has the brown backdrop without any of the icons - and I can get out of it by hitting Start again, but that menu is also broken until I restart the game. HOWEVER, I can't close the game because I have no menus. And I can't Alt-Tab, because if the game is in this zero-menu state, the game won't be alt-tabbable, and I can't do Ctrl-Alt-Esc/Del because of the aforementioned reasons. So I have to restart my PC.

What I did try to do is go into Borderless mode, but I can't exactly say if I was being lucky during the 30m I tried this cause I didn't get any crashing or hitching. However, that also bumps up my GPU usage and temps, and I'd rather not have that being a thing. And again, I don't really have a way of proving this actually helped. I've googled for hours and haven't been able to find people with these same issues. And what's weirder is how they suddenly appeared out of nowhere after having played the full game+expansions once + having played through the initial 10-15 hours with no problems.

So, yeah, small TL;DR:
  • I've played Base game + Expansions before with no issues;
  • Decided to start a new game, this time with some simple mods;
  • Played about 10-15 hours, all was going peachy keen, belly jean.
  • Realized I wanted a different Voorhis interview choice;
  • Did a new new save, where I was going through all the dialog options all the same, but mashing X a bunch during any conversations or cutscenes;
  • That playstyle seemed to sequence break some things, so I had to restart the save instance;
  • Weird freezing and crashing started to occur hours later in black screens from fade ins/outs;
  • Terrible issues with menus disappearing and not being able to exit the game because it won't let me alt tab or ctrl-alt-del



Huge thanks if you've read this far, I'd love to know what you guys might suggest. Cheers.
 
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1. What happens if you play with no mods?

2. Are you sure its not a h/w problem ie. do your old saves work properly?

3. Maybe 'hairworks on' is too much this time around?
 
ockpii;n8486030 said:
For this second playthrough I decided to mod-up a little bit. So I got Friendly Meditation, Extended View Distance, Better NPC Faces or whatever it's called, Main Menu Animator, Nitpicker's Mod, Toussaint Bright Interiors, Volumetric Clouds in Skellige, HD Reworked Project, Disabled Story Book Intros, No Dirty Lens Effect + No Water Droplets on screen, Hair LOD increase, and that's it. So nothing too major in terms of changing the game, just minor cosmetic stuff, with a little bit of housekeeping.

You've likely identified your issue right here. There is no such thing as "these mods wouldn't cause a problem". I would start by ensuring you've read the descriptions and instructions for each of these mods thoroughly (no mashing X for this part ;)). It's likely an incompatibility between two mods that will require a script merger or for one of the non-compatible mods to be removed.

Volumetric clouds and anything that increases the load of Hairworks are major additions, not minor ones. I would start with those.
 
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I actually selected the mods a few weeks prior to starting the new playthrough and went through all the details in versions and potential conflicts, and such, and nothing was off there. When I actually started, there were a few non-mergeable conflicts, but they didn't give any problems until, again, like 10-15 hours into the game, which is the frustrating part.

In any case, main menu issues seem to stem from the Main Menu Animation Selector, because in order to use Friendly Meditation, you need the Unification Patch, which makes it so the Blood & Wine start screen isn't default, so I was using the MMAS to make it do that. However, that seems to break the actual menu from time to time, so that's gone.

I decided to take out the Faces and Hair mods as well, because I can't really justify having them on, as I don't really see a huge difference unless I'm actively looking for it. Plus, it's one less point of failure, and the non-mergeable conflicts came from these mods. Regardless, they actually didn't affect performance, just stability, I suppose, with the weird crashing and hitching in situations where they weren't even relevant (ie, in places with no hair aside from Geralt's, and just monster faces, so no HD face stuff).

I also took out the Unification Patch alongside the Main Menu Animation thing and Friendly Meditation. As such, the game seems to not have any issues, but it is frustrating that they started off by working well, and started acting up. I was going to try the UP with FM just to try it out, as much as I hate the other menu screens, but when I did, for some reason the buttons in the UI changed, as showed in the picture that says ockpii, where it should look like the black picture. That is without the UP or FM, it's just the vanilla game with the few mods I left on that have nothing to do with extra menus or anything like that. Also, these old-like XBox buttons remain even if I use the keyboard, so they're overwriting even the PC buttons.

What I've been doing to reset the game is the Verify Local Game files on Steam, and that's worked fine in resetting the stuff that these mods have been changing the in Content and Bin folders, but I've never had this UI change happen before. So that is, I guess, the only thing I need help with, at this juncture.

Should I just reinstall the game at this point? Can't exactly see how else I'd be fixing this odd UI issue, but maybe you've dealt with it before. Stability-wise, everything is alright, now, the final experiment is just to use the UP with FM and without the main menu thing (as that seemed to be the cause for the menus breaking) to see if that breaks anything, as that has no denounced merging problems.

Cheers

EDIT: Good news, though, using the Unification Patch alongside the Friendly Meditation Mod seems to bring no issues at all, just been playing for a couple of hours. Just wondering about the UI change, at this point.

EDIT2: After uninstalling the Unification Patch and verifying files again, the icons are still bugged.
 

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Good-good, as long as everything is working! If it is, I would recommend leaving well-enough alone until you re-install the game. The trouble with adding / removing mods is that not all mod authors and mod managers do things correctly for every mod. It's totally possible for the removal of a mod to introduce an issue. It's also possible for a mod to leave problematic data resident in your save-state, which means the only way to fix it is to start a new game (removing the mod itself does not alter references to it in a saved game.)

Not sure about the UI. Could be left over from a mod. (Any UI mod would override the default hud. If two mods affect references to the UI, the one that loads LAST will be the only one that is actually used.)

Seems like you may have found a sweet spot with this one -- hopefully! I find that testing fate in such situations is like sticking my hand back in the hive for...just one more...little...taste of honey.

*buuuuuuzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZ...!*
 
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So! Odd stuff. I reinstalled just to put my mind at ease, and ran the game with 0 mods, and the buttons still are the same! I'm wondering if it has to do with this weird Steam update where it asked me to 'register' my controller (which is a 360 controller). Very very strange occurrence.

In any case, I very much appreciate the suggestions and support! Hopefully this one odd thing will also disappear, I have no idea where it's coming from. The only thing I can think of the the new Steam update that asked me stuff about my controller, but honestly I don't have a clue, which is sad. Certain keys like the Pass Round in Gwent still maintain the flat-gray design, but other than that, this style overpowers everything else, including keyboard and mouse prompts.
 
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Did you reinstall to the same path? Did you manually delete the prior installation directory before re-installing? Were you using a mod manager for any mod that would have affected the hud?

If a mod is installed, and a mod manager points to a specific path (or the mod is installed directly to the installation directory), then re-installing to the same path will mean that files may still be in place to override the vanilla game files. (Uninstallation only removes the files that the vanilla game knows to look for / re-installation does not overwrite additional files that may already be in existing paths: mod / override folders and files may still exist. -AND/OR- Mod managers may use "virtual directories" and are independent programs that will point to the game's installation directory and "mod" files by referencing the virtual directory instead of the actual installation files. If that's the case, you may need to completely uninstall the mod manager and manually delete the mod files from the manager's directory paths.)
 
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Owait, my edit didn't go through, but last night I figured it out. It was a recent Steam Beta update that changed it when it asked me about my 360 controller. I opted out of the beta updates on Steam and it rolled back to non-Beta and it fixed it. And the problem only came up after that Steam update, so yeeee.
 
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