I play the game from STEAM. When game crashes to Desktop and especially when your Windows freezes afterwards it has something to do with your hardware. There is a number of problems, one of which could be overheating, another - lack of power distributed throughout your PC hardware. For example if you have a good GPU and your Power Supply is not good enough when GPU accelerator kicks in and DOES IT KICK in this game
(which means its pretty and uses shader memory and GPU processing units) - your PC runs out of power and may freeze/cut off. If you use any custom heat sinks either on CPU or GPU - it could be overheating problem like if you didn't apply the sealant properly.
If your computer is stock and you haven't customized it at all - you may have a faulty RAM stick that causes your PC to freeze when the failing memory blocks are being accessed.
While there is a number of problems may be related to crashes I can say 100% it may be hardware related. I say hardware because for example if some of your drivers are outdated, its still a driver for specific hardware, like GPU driver or chipset drivers or even bad sound card drivers can cause this.
usually when you crash people suggest to:
1. update your hardware AND firmware to the latest version, which includes graphics card, motherboard chipset and sound card are the most important
2. make sure you have air circulation in your PC and that either your CPU or GPU not overheating. Game is using a lot of graphics card power and processor power. if either of those are not sealed with heatsink properly - your PC will freeze as soon as they reach the max allowed temperature to prevent the damage to the component that is overheating.
3. Try to play on lowest settings, if that helps then you definitely have overheating issues.
But updating drivers would be a good start.
Hope it helps.
