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:
Huge thanks if you've read this far, I'd love to know what you guys might suggest. Cheers.
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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