Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Game keeps crashing, can NOT figure out why

Computer specs are well-above minimum specs:

* Core i7-8700K CPU. (default clock speeds; CPU never exceeds 40% utilization)
* 16 GB RAM. (ram usage never exceeds ~13 GB)
* NVMe M2 SSD
* GTX 980 Ti GPU. (default clock speeds)

I run the game at medium settings at 1440p resolution, I get 40+ FPS consistently.

I am running 0 mods, and I am running 0 other applications in the background.

I have the most recent drivers.

Regardless of whether I use Directx11 or Vulkan, the game crashes often.

I even bought a new GPU, an RX 6700 XT, the game still crashes despite running at all MEDIUM graphics settings (Dx11 or Vulkan; in fact Vulkan crashes upon start). I've verified game integrity 5x.

No other game crashes. I can run PUBG or WoW for hours, 0 issues.

The game ONLY crashes when I "do" something. It could be quick-traveling, it could be in the middle of combat, it could be talking to a merchant. But if I AFK and leave the game running and don't touch it, it doesn't crash. The game is bugged as hell. And the recent hot"fixes" have made it worse; on release day I played for 12+ hours with 0 crashes.

I haven't had a problem in 120 hours, minus a hiccup here and there, up until now. I'm stuck in the refugee camp in act 3 to random crashes. I can't replicate it, but I also can't even get far enough to explore the area to finish and move on. I just updated my gpu drivers and restarted my pc and it actually crashed faster than what it normally has been crashing at. Again, no problem up until act 3 and I turned some settings down, and then way down to no help. My pc is well over recommended specs. It's basically unplayable for me right now in this state.

ryzen 7 7700x
amd radeon 6900xt
32 gb ram
installed on SSD
launching from steam library on both dx11 and vulkan to same issue. have tried verifying files multiple times.
no mods ever installed

Not sure what to do, just want to let you know I'm also struggling with similar symptoms. Hoping it gets some attention because I've been having the most fun in a while playing BG3.

Edit to add that I did the suggest fix in this thread posed by 1Sascha and have had positive results for a couple hours now. Thanks!!

thanks. good to know i'm not the only person to whom this game is unplayable

It's not just you. A lot of people have had issues since Patch 2 landed, and more after Hotfix 5.

You'll get the obvious replies of "turn off the mods" etc, but don't its definitely something else. Just didn't want you thinking it was just you, as for a while I honestly thought that was the case for me

Re-posting this from a thread I created on the BG3-Steam forum:

"If anyone's having similar issues: It's been two days now since I disabled the launcher "for real". Using



in BG3 launch options in Steam (bg3.exe for Vulkan, bg3_dx11.exe for DirectX11). BTW: The examples in the linked article are missing the "3" from both file names ("bg.exe" when it should be "bg3.exe"), so copy-pasting them won't work.

Two 4 hour+ sessions with zero issues/crashes and Windows Reliability Monitor now has zero entries for me besides normal stuff like update-history events. No more scary red critical error entries in there.

Seems pretty clear that the lauchner is what messed things up for me.

Another interesting observation from the Reliability Monitor's timeline is that this seems to have started with the August 25th patch. On that day, my system's reliability took a huge nose-dive and since then there were at least one, more commonly two or even more, red entries/critical errors caused by the launcher-app. Plus the semi-regular, near daily, hard freezes I've talked about in my OP. That patch also gave me tons of "regular" CTDs during gameplay - those stopped with a hotfix published on Aug 26th, but the hard crashes/freezes didn't go away until I actually disabled the launcher.

According to some folks who took a look at my Windows error-codes over on a German Windows/IT-board, the launcher seems to have some sort of conflict with Windows .NET framework. At least on my system it does."


END of re-post.


What it boiled down to for me was this:

Bought/installed the game Aug 19th and it didn't give me any trouble until the Aug 25th patch. That one caused lots of normal CTDs during gameplay... like multiple CTDs per session. Plus I started to experience hard-crashes/freezes, usually after longer sessions. PC would freeze up completely (no BSOD), no more response to any input (not even the reset-button). A long press of the power button was the only way to get it out of that state. These CTDs went away with a fix they deployed a day later (Aug 26th), but my PC freezing up kept continuing.

I started checking Windows Event Viewer and found all sorts of errors in there, so I started to clean up and update my system.
1. Updated my BIOS
2. Updated Windows and confirmed NVidia drivers were up to date (although I do that regularly anyway)
3. Updated my mobo's chipset drivers
4. Updated my built-in Intel devices' (like LAN-adapter, etc) drivers
5. Ran Windows Memory Analyzer, no errors found
6. Ran Windows File System repair/analysis which *did* find and repaired some errors.
7. Removed all sorts of bloatware/helper apps from PC and/or autostart. Stuff like MSI Mystic Light, OpenRGB, Samsung Magician, etc were all banned from my system.
8. Kept Windows power-plan on "balanced"


I am as sure as I can be that the launcher was to blame for most of the stuff that was going on with BG3. The time-line in my Windows Reliability Monitor pretty much confirms this, since ever since Aug 25th, the reliability score went downhill and the timeline started to fill up with red warning icons when there were none before. And all of those entries always involved the Larian Launcher, often more than once per day. Plus, as I've stated in the quoted post: It's been two days now since I disabled this thing for good and the reliability-timeline's been clean since then.




^Red marking: Aug 25th, hard crashes/PC freezes and "normal" CTDs start happening
Green marking: Sept 7/8, Launcher disabled for good, no more critical entries and no more PC-freezes/hard crashes.

It seems important to use the method I quoted to disable the launcher. Before I had simply use the "bypass launcher" command in the Steam launch-options, but that, clearly, didn't work as I thought it would. The launcher didn't pop into view any longer when I started the game, but it must've still started/tried to run in the background. Using the command-line I posted in the quoted text up there *really* prevents the launcher from starting up and, thus far, my game's been running flawlessly and my system hasn't crashed on me.



S.

i'm not using any mods

amazing post, thank you very much!

do you think if I simply closed the launcher after starting the game, that would fix things?

You're most welcome.


I've no idea, but seeing how simply using the "--bypass -launcher" (or whatever the syntax for that command was) command in Steam did not really keep the launcher from...err... launching, I wouldn't be too sure that it actually shuts down when you let it open and then close it manually. It might still be running in the background.

Also: You might want to check your Reliability Report and see if you're also getting a ton of critical errors caused by the launcher.

Enter "view reliability history" (without the "") in your Windows search bar to find the app. Or look up Dell's instructions on how to find it.

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/...lity-monitor-to-identify-software-issues

Open the app and check your timeline... crashes/critical errors will show up as red icons in the time-line. Click on the day with such a red icon and a list of events will pop up underneath the time-line. If it's like on my system, you will find critical errors for that launcher pretty much for every single day that has a critical error reported.

It'll look like this:


^ Note that the entries you see here are just for the highlighted day... all the other red icons you see here for all the other days shown in my report all indicate at least one critical error involving "Larin Launcher".



Like I said: Using the "bypass" method resulted in the launcher not *visibly* opening when I launched the game - but it *was* still running in the background (otherwise it couldn't have crashed twice per day, right?).

What really seems to keep it from starting up is that command-line I posted further up (the one ending with %command%). No more crashes/PC freezes for me since I've done that. At least during the two days since I started using that launch-command.

I don't see why you wouldn't want to at least try that method. You don't really need that silly launcher anyway and you only have to put the command in there once.



^ RMB on BG3 in Steam Library, click on "Properties", then this dialogue will pop up. Look for "Launch Options" at the bottom right. You need to adjust the path to reflect your installation's location of course ... unless you also have the game installed on your G:\-drive...

Use "bg3.exe" if you're running Vulkan, "bg3_dx11.exe" if you want to run the DX11-version.




S.

200iq post

amazing how you figured this out and Larian is sitting there drooling

The advice to try running the game directly from the exe has been around for weeks. It will not fix every problem but the info has been there for people who bother to look.

TBH, I didn't figure that much out. Just went around the web, asking for folks' opinions/help who are much more knowledgeable than myself on these matters. And then I simply started to read what my PC was reporting...

What I will say though is that, at least on my PC, this seems to prove that the launcher is indeed what's messing things up for folks. I just played BG3 for at least 5 hours straight and... nothing. Still got a clean Reliability Report as well. I haven't checked it, but I bet if I re-enabled the launcher, the crashes would come back.

I also talked to a buddy of mine telling him about all this and he said he never had any sort of crashes... though he was on vacation for the last 2 weeks or so, so he might have simply not played the game with that Aug 25th patch applied. In any case, since most of the people with crashes whose reports I found on the web were on Intel-systems (at least the ones I read who did mention their specs), I asked my buddy for his and he is on an AMD-system.

No idea if this has any significance, just thought I'd share it.



Yes, I found that advice pretty early on as well ... however: Only using that launch-option that I ended up using seems to truly shut off the launcher. Using the "--bypass - launcher" command-line did not help in my case.

Besides: I think it's not too much to ask that this sort of thing gets ironed out. Especially since we're talking about a, IMO, rather pointless feature like a dedicated game-launcher you don't need to launch the game.




S.

A couple of days ago I had to manually set the exe to high priority in task manager to avoid horrible stuttering and FPS issues, but today my framerate is relatively stable — only now it's crashing constantly for whatever reason. My game is not only crashing every hour but also crashing discord at the same time. This makes me suspect it's another memory leak.

The game has been borderline unplayable for me since patch 2. It's infuriating.

Dang, I tried to bypass the launcher with the %command% prompt and it still crashed. The Aug 25th patch has been a death sentence for my game and I really don’t want to start over after 40 hours.

Is it possible to bypass the launcher and still play multiplayer?

Are we talking CTDs or is your PC hard-crashing? Like blue screen of death/freezing up?
If you're "just" CTDing, you should be able to find error logs created by the game itself (they're put into the BG3 root-folder, IIRC). Take a couple of those reports and also do a dxdiag and send all that to Larian's support.


If it's hard crashes you're getting, you should write down the error code the BSOD gives you. If the PC just freezes up on you without even a BSOD (like mine did) you should use Windows Event-Viewer and check for entries/error codes around the timestamp when the crash occurred. On WIn 11, just RMB on the Start-button and select "Event Viewer". I would google those error codes and also submit them to Larian - or try a specialized Windows/HW forum with knowledgeable people on it.

Also, as I stated in earlier posts, use Windows Reliability Report to see what sort of critical errors your system had at/around time of crash. Funnily enough, all my errors in my Reliability Report were caused by "LariLauncher", not by BG3.exe.

Have you tried some of the system maintenance I mentioned in my post? I did a lot of cleaning up/updating, and while I'm pretty sure those didn't do the trick for me on their own, they might have helped once I disabled the launcher.

Besides: Keeping all your HW-components' drivers up to date (not just Windows and your GPU-drivers) and verifying your Windows installation's integrity can't really hurt. I'd start with things like:


At the risk of repeating myself:

- Chipset/Mobo-drivers - go to your mobo's manufacturer's support page and see what they have for your model of motherboard.

- Intel components drivers. For example, their i255 ethernet controller is apparently infamous for causing trouble and I had drivers from 2021 installed before I updated them to 2023 ones. And those drivers I had to find "by hand". Neither the driver-package from MSI (my mobo's manufacturer) included these nor did they get updated by Intel's own online auto-updater.

- update on-board sound-card drivers.

- They say you shouldn't really update the BIOS on a system that's running fine, but ... if your BIOS version is older or really old, you might want to think about updating it. I updated mine anyway because I wanted to prep my board for 13th gen Intel CPUs. My Z690 board needed a BIOS-update for that. It's really not that hard to do this these days, but if you're not sure how to update the BIOS, check your motherboard manufacturer's website for exact instructions and then follow those to the letter. You don't want to brick your motherboard by going about flashing the BIOS the wrong way.

- run Windows system file checker. How-to is here:
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/...system-file-checker-in-microsoft-windows

This is, basically, a kind of "OS-re-install light". It will check your Windows installation's file integrity and repair corrupt files and/or re-install missing ones. It won't tell you what exactly it found and repaired (gotta open a log-file to see that), but it will tell you if it detected errors and if those errors were repaired. It did detect and repair errors on my system and took, maybe, 5 minutes to complete.

I'd also do stuff like disable any sort of in-game overlays (GF-Experience overlay, Steam Overlay, MSI Afterburner OSD, etc) and throw out other background bloatware like the stuff I banned from my system (RGB-SW crap, Samsung Magician, etc.). Plus if you're running overclocked, go back to default settings/clockspeeds and see if that makes a difference.

Plus you can try the usual in-game stuff, like reducing details, switching display mode ("borderless window" is supposedly the safest/most stable option), activate in-game framerate-limiter at 60 FPS, etc.




S.

it still crashes, though much less.

so it definitely helped, but Larian's product is still in crappy shape

Still looking good (no idea why this "yourphone"-stuff gives me installation errors, since I don't have a phone linked to Windows, but that's a different matter, I assume.. ).

Between Sept 7/8 and today, I've played every day and put in at least 15 hours of BG3-gameplay overall - with no CTDs, no PC hard-crashes/lock-ups and, as you can see, no critical errors reported on my system.


To those who still suffer problems with the launcher disabled, I'll repeat my advice of updating *all* your component drivers (not just Windows update and GPU drivers - so chipset/mobo drivers, other built-in devices drivers like ethernet controller or soundcard), checking your Windows Reliability Report to ID critical errors and running Windows System File Checker to check for broken/missing files in your Windows-installation. If you aren't super butter-fingered, you might also want to update your BIOS (especially if your current BIOS is really out of date).

Also: Try reducing and switching around in-game settings. For example: Apparently "Borderless Window" is the way to go.

Forgot to add that I also disabled Steam Cloud Sync since I don't need it and it gave me sync-errors after nearly every session. No idea if that could help, but it's one of the things I've changed.

There's clearly something going on here with BG3 (and the launcher) "triggering" problems on some systems. My theory is that while these underlying OS-/driver-/HW-issues were probably there all along, they might not have caused any abnormal behavior in day-to-day usage of the PC or playing other games outside of BG3/Larian's launcher.

Maybe you could liken it to having a small hole in the roof of your house. If you're not actively looking for it, you might not even notice it's there until it starts to rain.


S.

Also experiencing a ton of crashing, since the aug 26th update. It actually seems to have gotten worse after one of the hotfixes. They are all crashes to desktop, displaying a Vulkan or DX11 error depending on which one I'm using. No discernable pattern in what causes the crash - it can happen in a tiny area, the open world, in and out of combat.

Fixes tried so far:
verifying steam installation
switching between DX11 and Vulkan
changing in-game settings (DLSS, AO, borderless, etc)
updating graphics drivers
skipping the launcher as mentioned previously
blowing out dust and checking that gpu/cpu temps are within norms while playing

Performance is quite good, except for occasionally encountering some strange stuttering in npc heavy areas. Like it can get real bad in Last Light Inn one day, and then be buttery smooth the next. Lowering settings doesn't seem to change that, even shaders and light sources.


Laptop with
i5 10300H
RTX 2060
16GB ram



While this is generally good advice, I do monthly updates of everything, bar BIOS. And run plenty of other demanding games. Particularly stuff like chipset, ethernet and realtek is almost never going to cause problems with a game, and if it does, it points to a motherboard or CPU failing. And BIOS issues are related to overheating and power draw usually

It's most likely a problem on the game's end in combination with some specific graphics drivers or gpus. Or something to do with how the game handles loading/caching

I think I already mentioned this, but according to some very knowledgeable folks who took a look at my Windows crash/error logs, the launcher seems to have some sort of conflict with Windows .NET framework.

From my own experience with other apps and demanding games, I would agree that this seems to be mostly the game's/launcher's fault. I mean... I can play DCS or IL-2 for hours on end with no CTDs or hard-crashes... and I play both these games in VR.

S.

I checked the event logs on my PC, and as 1Sascha says, it looks like the launcher is crashing BG3 with a .net error. This is rather curious, becuase I start the game without the launcher, and I've checked - when the game starts, there is no launcher in the process list. I have no idea why the launcher suddenly makes an appearence, so I went and renamed it. So far, after about one hour of playing, no crashes. Then again, I've been working in IT long enough to know that this is not yet significant... ;-)

So forget that last mail. Even if you rename the launcher, Steam will add it back. And it crashed again. After rechecking the logs, I think the .Net/launcher error is a followup one, because I've overlooked this:
Faulting application name: bg3_dx11.exe, version: 4.37.0.362, time stamp: 0x00000000
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.22621.2134, time stamp: 0xeee69ec7
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000033aba
Faulting process id: 0x0x169C
Faulting application start time: 0x0x1D9E57AC2338AE9
Faulting application path: F:\games\Steam\steamapps\common\Baldurs Gate 3\bin\bg3_dx11.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report Id: 43ceda13-daa9-4e35-9209-8619ce38d46f
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

I have a similar error for Vulcan, so it doesn't matter which type of graphics API I use.
Trying to run this as admin. Not hoipeful, though.

Just wanted to add that I'm having the same issue. For 250+ hours, things were fine (other than the occasional hiccup). Now, I can't even get past the loading screen. Maybe this is the universe telling me to take a break.

I have the exact same error with the exact same fault module path that leads to ntdll.dll. I have done everything I possibly can to figure out why this is happening and how to fix it, but am unable to get it to work.

I had no issues at all then a few days ago, bam and now I can not load any save files. It is super frustrating, I have tried everything to resolve this.

Hey folks. So, there was an update for Windows 11 last night (I know bc it woke me up, which is unusual). Anyways, I tried BG3 (and Remnant 2, which was also being lame), and everything seems to be okay. Hope this fixes it for y'all, too!

Hey just wanted to say I tried the following:
Updated MoBo drivers and audio drivers
Ran that System file checker
Reduced quality to high
Enabled that feature In settings if textures were loading slow
And capping framerates at 60 per second

In addition to my previous work of doing a reinstall of game, verifying file integrity, bypassing larian launcher, and running as administrator.

It works. Thank god finally I played for 5 hours today and it’s running very well. Thanks for the help.

Edit: I thought I replied to 1Sacha but I wanted to say thank you for all the great advice.

Well... let's see. Time to eat some humble pie I think (or maybe not.. no idea), since after almost a week of trouble-free BG3, my PC froze up on me again a couple of nights ago.

This time it happened when I was alt-tabbed out of the game, browsing the web.

The only errors I can find in the Reliability Report now are for Microsoft Teams Updater. I went and removed Microsoft Teams from my autostart and it's not running now, but the error for the updater keeps popping up every day.

Going to have to look into this one again. But at least the launcher isn't crashing anything any longer. Those Teams Updater errors are almost always around the times I've booted up the PC and nowhere near the one freeze/lockup I've encountered. I've started with uninstalling MS Teams altogether, since I don't need or use that thing anyway.

If anyone can "read" this, here's the error report (German OS, but the entries should explain themselves to those with more knowledge than myself, I suppose):


I suppose the updater and MS Teams itself are two different apps and disabling Teams alone will not disable the updater. Haven't found an obvious way yet to disable that thing, though. I already did another File Systems Check, which came up "clean". As it should have since I ran it only a few hours after the rather large Win 11-update from a couple of days ago.


*shrug*

I'm starting to wonder if there's something more fundamentally wrong with my PC. Then again... none of these CTDs or hard-crashes ever happened before I installed and started playing BG3, so ... yeah. The errors probably were there all along even before that, but since the PC or other games never crashed on me like that, I never bothered looking into the logs. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose..



EDIT: Just went over to the "Win-Geeks" board again and folks recommended I should use gpedit.msc to prohibit Windows Update from messing with any of my drivers. Reason being that Windows Update *might* install an older driver over a more recent one that was installed manually. Other than that, I didn't get any more insights into this particular crash, but then again there isn't really a logfile or even a detailed entry for it to work from AFAIK. I guess when the PC just hard-crashes/freezes without even a Blue Screen Of Death, there's not much for the OS to log, other than an abnormal shutdown of Windows.


Again: What I do know is that this PC has been crash-/trouble-free, running other demanding games on a daily basis since March/April 2022 (when I built it) and that all the trouble started pretty much *exactly* on the day I installed BG3 and then became really bad with the Aug 25th patch.




S.

I am having same issue. havnt played since early. PC has been upgraded and clean reinstall of windows. deleted early access saves. skipped launcher as mentioned in previous posts.

Have no idea what else to do. Maybe just waiting for a patch?

Maybe shorten your BG3-sessions. In my case, these hard-crashes only ever occurred at the end of longer stints (like 3, 4 hours). Although, like almost all of this, this could be just a coincidence.

Oh, and I am now getting desperate and tried the "slow HDD"-option in the video-settings. It only uses up slightly more system and video RAM (sys is now slightly over 12 of 32 GB, VRAM at 7.5 of 12 GB), and perhaps having the game accessing the SSD less frequently will put less of a strain on the system. *shrug*

Another thing I did after the last hard-crash was to abandon the unvervolted profile for my GPU while playing BG3. I went with the Auto OC curve Afterburner generated for me, which had proved very stable both in other games and in stress-testing. Granted: The undervolted profile also held up under some brutal and long stress-tests (or I wouldn't have used it), but who knows? If this happens again, I'll try running the GPU on stock-settings, next or perhaps even switch it to its "SILENT"-BIOS.

I also wonder what will happen once I get to Act III in my current playthrough. I'm still in Act II and both it and Act I were trouble-free except for that one hard crash. Perhaps once I get back into Act III things will take a turn for the worse. Performance is markedly worse once you get to the city. Disabling Dynamic Crowds helps a bit, but the drop in performance is very noticeable still. Plus I'm pretty sure Act III hasn't been optimized to the same degree as Acts I and II, so ...



S.

I'm not even getting any time to have shorter sessions haha. I've had it crash in character creator. would love some news on this from larian

Aw, crap.. this is even more intolerable then..

Have you submitted a support ticket to them? I'm sure they're up to their eyeballs in support requests and all I got in response to my request was a long-ish standard reply with all the things you can do to make the game run more stable.

But it can't hurt to try, I suppose.


S.

@nyelin exception code: 0xc0000005 is the harddrive... i'd start by checking what type of drive the F is and see if there are other imput errors logged in your event viewer

Y

You are talking bollocks again.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=exception+code%3A+0xc0000005&hps=1&start=1&atb=v185-1&ia=web

It’s the strangest thing, after my last post saying things were fine and a long game session I thought everything was good again; went back to play tonight and CTD’s all over again. Waiting for patch 3 since before patch 2 the game was going swimmingly.

Ive already posted a thread along these lines but just to reiterate, this has been an ongoing instability issue after about a week when the game launched.

FOr me, I can at times play several days without a single crash, then out of the blue the game wont play for an hour without just blinking off. There is also about a 50/50 chance when it does that my config files will also be missing right after the event. I have since been keeping copies of them all so I dont have to spend time redoing all my settings as well.

The only positive note is that when I do lose my config files, I get another storage chest in my camp, each one a different color.

Have tried everything people here have mentioned, drivers, running from the .exe file (which seems to take forever to load the shaders) dumping all background programs, sacrificing a chicken, you name it. Every time I think I have it figured out, a day or 2 later another wave of crashes.

The real sad part is that by the time they finally work all of this out I will have most likely lost interest in the game and moved on to something else.

This is (one reason) why I rarely buy games nowadays until several years after release.

Hey there - since 9/17 my game has been crashing nonstop or frozen/lagging to the point where it is unplayable.

I’ve disabled the launcher. The mods. I’ve deleted and reinstalled. I’ve verified the game. I’ve ran it on Vulkan and DX and still -

I have completed every quest in Act 3 and was going to launch into the final quest.

Alas - it’s not happening. I want to add that I played BG3 flawlessly on the DX server. But when entering Act 3 I had to play on Vulkan only bc the other server was a load in nightmare.

I ran the test on windows to see where my performance error was and it wasn’t the launcher that crashed. It bg3.exe everytime.

I’m really bummed because I’ve put over 150 hours on my first playthrough. And now I’m unable to finish the story out. I don’t even want to start another playthrough bc whats the point if I get this far and can’t finish it again.

It helps to know I’m not alone. But yeah - until something is patched I think its safe to say I have to step away from the game for a while.

Do you do a clean install like Larian Studious Suggested? Because I haven't had one problem?
And your not going to get a straight answer on here? Have you taken the time to open up a support ticket? I'm guessing not lol!

Just as a frame of reference, I didn't have any issues until hotfix 6 . It may have been Patch two, because I was away for a week between patch two and hf 6, so couldn't play.

I've opened a ticket. And I went through every troubleshooting step I could find, including a fresh install of the game *and* a fresh install of Windows. Nothing helped. Twice I thought I fixed the issue, because after making a change, I could play for more than an hour without any problems. Only to find on the next day that inside of five minutes after loading my last save, the game crashed again. And before I started the game, the only thing I did was starting the pc and logging in.

I usually start out with thinking that the issue is on front of the monitor (in other words: me), but in this instance I am now convinced that Larian messed something up - at least for my config. It's one of the disadvantages of the PC ecosystem: there are so many variants in the installation, that it is impossible to test them all. So it is perfectly possible that most players aren't affected at all, but a chosen few have just the wrong cofniguration.

Hello!

Had anyone experienced things like me?
Gameplay crashed, to the head to Mountain Pass. Loading screen with 0%. It was at Monday evening. I got after the crash, a pop up window. It offered me, that next time when I re-start the game it will check for update at Steam. Game started, than loaded down something from Steam, than the loading screen. After 100% the game loaded for me the EULA (End User License Agreement), which I never asked, and can't go back. Any suggestion?

Ive still been trying to figure it out, checking my event viewer several times a day to see if anything is popping up there. The only thing of note was 1 or 2 random .net file crashes. Soooo..

I went ahead and uninstalled then reinstalled all of the system framework files. Then for good measure, I uninstalled any common visual libraries that they frequently call on, so I uninstalled all of my C++ files as well just because I was already having so much fun and I love spending an afternoon reinstalling crap for unstable buggy software.

Reinstalled all of the frameworks 4.8 and 3.5 through the system installer, left it to individual apps for the rest.

For the cherry on the pie I decided to mark the config files as hidden and read only. This shouldnt effect anything on the system side but will make it harder for apps to "accidently" delete them.

OK all thats done so play the game again and see what we got.

I was cautiously optimistic for a few hours as all seemed to be running smooth again, just like my first week of launch, and for awhile I thought I really had nailed it. Then after about 8-10 hrs of play, I had my first crash. A few hrs later, another one, then another and another, the more the game crashed, the more frequently they seemed to happen.

Its mystifying as I cant even get an event viewer report of what is going on, event viewer shows no system, application or admin event at all. The game just stops running, the crash report follows, and thats it.

BUT.. on a bright note... at least the config files are not being deleted now, thats progress.

I have had similar issues with posters in this thread, but I ran memtest86 and ended up having hundreds of errors (despite new PC). sooo... bad RAM could be an issue for some here. worth a test

in a 4 party group and it was only the 1 PC having issues. others are 1 gaming laptop, 1 10700/2080 RTX, and 1 AMD(??), 100 hours play session 0 crashes with this group. 4080 RTX new build was crashing because of bad ram tho...

If I were having issues with any other apps I would go right to testing my hardware, but... Im not. I play triple A games all the time with no problems, no errors. I would find it highly suspect that everyone experiencing crashing errors right after a certain period of play time could be attributed to mass RAM fail. Most people here agree, the game was running fine for awhile then at some point all of this started.

I bought the game at 9/17/2023 and I got crashes since then. I mainly play with a friend and he wants me to stream my gameplay over Discord because it is easier to share stuff and funnier in combat as well. But I keep crashing, crashing to desktop. The game just closes up without any warning or anything, bam and I see my desktop. I played a couple hours solo too, but there I do not experience crashes.

Looking at my Reliability Monitor every time either BG3 stropped working or Lari Launcher. And no matter which one stops working the other one will soon follow suit. Today I have 5 events of the Lari Launcher stopping to work, but the Reliability Monitor didn't catch any BG3 crashes. But I had them. The interesting thing here is, the spots the game does crash. I never had a crash in combat, most of the time I crash when my friend talks with an NPC and I chime in, sometimes it would just boot me out of the scene suddenly and sometimes if I try to chime in again it crashes. Other times if I not try to chime in again it also crashes. Interestingly my friend doesn't crash like that when we play, but he said he always crashes when the game loads and he wants to switch the Twitch channel he watches.

For now I will try to use that command to disable the Lari Launcher and take a look what happens.

did you try running memtest86?

At the risk of jinxing it, I am cautiously optimistic about patch 3, as so far today no crashes or errors at all.

Of course, thats not saying much as this has happened before. If I make it till the end of Act 3 without a CTD then Ill be a believer.

I played yesterday with Patch #3 and I still get crashes to desktop. I seen another thread talking about crashes when listening in on another players convo in a multiplayer game, yeah I had that as well. Sometimes it works, sometimes it throws me out of it suddenly and when I try to listen in again... crash to desktop.

Yesterday I was doing what 1Sascha suggested, take a look at my Reliability Monitor. I have very few Critical Events until 9/17/2023 where I have like 5. And that is incidentally the day I bought Baldurs Gate 3. The next day, 18th has 11 Critical Events... all either LariLauncher or Baldurs Gate 3. Usually the LariLauncher stops working with a couple BG3 stopping to respond. I play many games on this PC, newer titles from Starfield over relative new games like Far Cry 6 or Final Fantasy 14. I never experience any crashes with other games... save crashes I self induced with AltF4.
Literally Baldurs Gate 3 is the only game causing trouble here. Interestingly the friend I play with, while he doesn't have such issues like I have, it isn't smooth sailing either. Whenever he does something on his second monitor while the game is in a loading screen... it crashes for him.

The interesting thing is I turned off the LariLauncher when I launch the game using that < "C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Baldurs Gate 3\bin\bg3_dx11.exe" %command% > in the Properties, but whenever I click "Quit Game" my Reliability Monitor would record a "BG3.exe stopped working" event.
But now that I turned off the LariLauncher, I need to do another session with my friend, to see if it helped.

I will eventually do a Memtest86, just to double check and it can't be bad to do it, but I didn't find time for that yet.
Also I don't think its my RAM, I had a RAM issue before with a bad stick and... it would BSOD my entire PC. It would also be super random, I could turn on the machine and play 5 minutes World of Warcraft and bam BSOD, or I could play 6 to 8 hours and then BSOD. It also would not matter what it was I do on my PC, you could watch YouTube or browse forums or heck even just go afk restroom and come back to a nice BSOD.

Looking around, somehow I get the feeling that it is indeed Baldurs Gate 3, not a issue with my PC. You see so many people that have small to big errors, this forum is full, the steam forum is full and you see it on reddit. You don't see that much for other games.
Also with a i7 11700k, a RTX 3080 and 32gig of RAM I am nowhere close to be at the lower end of system specs required to play Baldurs Gate 3.

all 4 PCs in our game have crashed at different times while listening in on conversations. This is the only crash scenario we have run into since patch 3 though

Yup, I created the other post talking about the same exact issue. People try to listen into dialogue in multiplayer and they start crashing 1 by 1. It's so annoying as we cant NOT talk to NPC's along the way. Unfortunately, we may have to wait for a fix as the crashes happen way to often to properly progress.

I just played some more and... crashing some more. Since disabling the LariLauncher I have racked up 10 crashes of the game and 3 "Hardware Errors".

I ran a DISM /checkhealth wich went through errrorless and a SFC /scannow which found errors that it fixed, to make sure my windows is ok.

I started to play with the friend together in his game, until it crashed to desktop. Then I opened a game and he joined me, we didn't even make it out of the Nautiloid before I had a crash to desktop. I have to add we stream the game using Discord to see what the other does.

Now I started a new game, streaming it to Discord because I assume that might be the culprit. I was done making my character and setting up the guardian... hit <proceed> and nothing happened. The game still ran, the proceed button was greyed out, I could hear the music and turn the guardian... but it didn't continue. I hit ESC and could select reset to main menu, which it tried to load... but the loading percent would not fill and it started to hang there. So I AltF4 it.

Now I deinstalled it, and I am installing it again, to another SSD I have, lets see.

The weird thing is, while this version of Baldurs Gate 3 not want to run I played over 30 hours 7 Days to Die without any crash, I even streamed it using discord. I played Final Fantasy 14 without issues for hours on end. Only this game doesn't want to run.

Interesting, after reinstalling it would crash a few times, with the LariLauncher running I would not see any popup in the Reliability Monitor about it. After each crash I let it check the Integrity of the Game Files and after two or so it stopped and I could play for 3 hours strait without any crash.
But as soon as I started to stream on Discord, not 5 minutes in... crash.

Baldurs Gate 3 is still a really buggy mess. At least Patch #3 made shadows not look like crap.

Looking good so far... I'm still a bit apprehensive, but this isn't half bad now:




Besides all the other changes I've made and "clean ups" I've done to my PC, there are three more things I've done since the last hard crash (Sept 15th):

1. Disabled the NVidia HD-audio device. I've found reports on the net that having it active while using your onboard soundcard might cause conflicts and since I don't use that thing anyway, I simply went into device manager and deactivated it. Seems it's now active again, possibly because I updated my GF-drivers yesterday and did a "clean" install.

2. I've disabled Windows Update for "third party" HW-drivers (so no more Win-Update installing, say, audio-card drivers on its own). Reason being that I'd been told that this *might* result in Windows overwriting newer drivers that I've installed manually with outdated stuff. I'm also kinda suspicious that some auto-updaters running in the background *might* have been responsible/partially responsible for my hard-crashes... because:

3. Uninstalled Microsoft Teams. As you can see here, it did cause quite a lot of critical errors in the past. Shot shows a random date with tons of critical errors caused by Teams-updater - and yes: I had one or two hard-crashes/PC freezes on that day:




These errors for Teams updater were another daily occurrence and seemed to always coincide with a freeze/hard-crash. They were also the only regular critical error left after I'd disabled the launcher and done all the other things to clean up my PC. Since I don't use Teams, I simply uninstalled that app.


Since then... well... you can see the reliability score rising in my first screenshot. Haven't had a single CTD or BSOD/hard-crash since Sept 16.



S.

So I finally seem to have gotten a grip on my CTD issues.

To make a (very) long story short, after having played two days without any issues, on the third day BG3 crashed seemingly on every other move. It was then that I finally realized that none of the changes I made had mattered. Every time I was able to play bg3 without crashes, I had restarted my PC. When playing with crashes, I had only shutdown my PC.

To explain this a bit further, when you shutdown Windows, you do not shut down Windows. Microsoft by default puts it into some sort of extended sleep mode, so that Windows can start faster if you start it again. A restart really shuts everything down and starts it again cleanly.

I had already disabled fast start and sleep in the power options, thinking this would be equivalent to the restart behavior, because I run a Soundblaster G6. While its sound output is so much better than whatever you find on the mainboard, the drivers usually aren't all that good, and I had issues with it if fast start was enabled. It looks like disabling fast start still doesn't shut down everything cleanly. I currently suspect that the G6 driver after a shutdown in some way doesn't reinitialize cleanly, interfering with whatever bg3 is doing, which then leads to the crashes.

So after restarting my PC I could play bg33 without any issues, and so far could repeat the experience. I just have to restart my PC before a bg3 session. I've since reverted most of my changes, and so far everything works nicely.

Yeah, disabling all that "fast start" stuff is one of the first things I did after building this PC. With M.2 SSDs or even "just" SATA SSDs, it really doesn't make much of a difference and you really don't want Windows to just hibernate when you "shut it off". As you said: This can cause all sorts of weirdness with drivers, etc.

Not sure if this is relevant here, but I *also* disabled the "fast start" functions in my BIOS. Think it's called "MSI Quick Boot/Quick Start" or something on my board. Pretty sure other manufacturers offer something similar.

The time you save by enabling all that stuff is quite inconsequential, IMO. We're talking maybe 10, 20 seconds on a halfway modern PC. Besides: I don't really mind the "wait" - things are still insanely fast these days. I used to run Windows Vista on an old fashioned HDD not *that* long ago. Meaning I would press the power button in the morning, fix me some breakfast and coffee, maybe have a smoke and when I returned to the PC after all that, it was, perhaps, up and running...

S.

LOL, I remember a time with Win98 myself, seen friends Win95 pc as well. If those had an issue or where installing things, you could do household chores to come back and see them not done. In the grand things of things... waiting 10 to 20 seconds is not really bothersome... compared to playing Fallout 4 and trying to exit a building in the Boston Downtown area on a 11th gen i7 with the game on a M2 x4 SSD and a 3080 and it takes 1:30 to load (yes I timed that) compared to that booting a windows in under 20 seconds is quite the achievement.

As for my crashes with Baldurs Gate 3, a friend got that Direct X Error I had before too. But his game usually runs stable without crash. I have to yet find time for another session.

The interesting thing for me is... I can play fine solo. But as soon as I try to stream gameplay over Discord I get either a crash or other weird behavior. Like the game suddenly not letting me interact with anything and not let me switch characters. If I try to close it it will hang and stop responding. I can't play in multiplayer either, the same stuff will happen.

hello people

I created an account just to let you know that the same thing is happening to me.

I've been playing the game for 120h and I've had 0 errors!
After the last patch the game started to not load games, I would load my save the first time and if something went wrong, I would load the game again and then it would crash. I tried to reinstall the game and it got worse, now it doesn't start from steam, the larios studio launcher appears, I give it to play in direct x or vulcan and it gives error "send errors" and check game data.

If I remove steam , I can play but I can not load games or start act 3.

I have reinstalled the game 4 times, I have deleted all content, including appdata.
I have tried removing the steam overlay, I have 0 mods. I have no antivirus. I can't install the game on another hard drive to test.

I have literally done everything on the internet and everything fails.

It's frustrating not being able to play anymore. It's all been the fault of the latest patch!

Heeeeeeeeeelp

Hotfix #7 still doesn't let me tp to any place on the Lower City. Tried all the saves I had but nothing seems to work. I'm re-installing right now just in case. Hope I don't get any crashes u.u

Are you referring to the DL today as HF7? I only ask because there is still no official post on the BG3 site about it, and if they did indeed HF I would like to read the notes.

Also just FYI, if anyone here has had the additional issue of your config files being overwritten or deleted after a crash or after Larians crash reporting tool has run, try this fix:

I was experiencing this problem about 50% of the time that config files would just disappear after a crash, so I was leaving my file explorer open to watch and see when they were deleted so I could cut and paste my backups in. I noticed something interesting in the process... that the files didnt disappear until AFTER the crash reporting tool had been sent. Even if I left it open for 10 minutes before clicking the "send" button. So it was painfully obvious that the reporting tool was the culprit here.

Since then I flagged all of my config files as read only, and have never had them erased. This works just fine as long as you untag them before you need to make any changes, then tag them back again after.

The path for configs is: C:\Users\*username*\AppData\Local\Larian Studios\Baldur's Gate 3\PlayerProfiles\Public

Wow, I'm getting extremely pissed off at the studio for making such an unplayable game! I have not been able to play this game since it was released in its full version and yet when I was An Early Access player it never once crashed at all! Now it crashes all the f****** time! And I'm getting extremely tired of it. At first, I thought it was software, no, that wasn't the problem. I tried every damn piece of advice people were giving me that wasn't the effing problem, I redid my hard drives I wiped them effing clean! Reinstalled software I ended up thinking it was my video card so I sent it back on an RMA then I thought it was my CPU so I went and bought a new one same one of course but it still doesn't help my system is as follows: i7 8700k 32 gigs of RAM Asus Prime z390-a LGE 1151 ATX Intel motherboard, over 3 TB of solid-state drive and an RTX 3080 ti so there is no goddamn way my system is responsible for the crashes it is this POS game and I am so effing tired of dealing with it they won't even give me a goddamn refund! I was hoping maybe if they did then I could go buy it on Steam and try it that way but no I'm fol. Oh and to top it all off I have messaged the company over half a dozen times with no proper results and I've sent them over a hundred and some odd crash reports and again still know God damn results! I seriously doubt I will ever buy a product from these people again never have I had any problems with most games like this and I've been playing games for over 30 years!

Wow, I'm getting extremely pissed off at the studio for making such an unplayable game! I have not been able to play this game since it was released in its full version and yet when I was An Early Access player it never once crashed at all! Now it crashes all the f****** time! And I'm getting extremely tired of it. At first, I thought it was software, no, that wasn't the problem. I tried every damn piece of advice people were giving me that wasn't the effing problem, I redid my hard drives I wiped them effing clean! Reinstalled software I ended up thinking it was my video card so I sent it back on an RMA then I thought it was my CPU so I went and bought a new one same one of course but it still doesn't help my system is as follows: i7 8700k 32 gigs of RAM Asus Prime z390-a LGE 1151 ATX Intel motherboard, over 3 TB of solid-state drive and an RTX 3080 ti so there is no goddamn way my system is responsible for the crashes it is this POS game and I am so effing tired of dealing with it they won't even give me a goddamn refund! I was hoping maybe if they did then I could go buy it on Steam and try it that way but no I'm fol. Oh and to top it all off I have messaged the company over half a dozen times with no proper results and I've sent them over a hundred and some odd crash reports and again still know God damn results! I seriously doubt I will ever buy a product from these people again never have I had any problems with most games like this and I've been playing games for over 30 years! On a somewhat brighter note, I am glad I am not the only one having major problems with this s***** product! LOL

I get your frustration, I really do ... but think about that statement for a moment. If your system wasn't part of the problem *in some way* the game would constantly be crashing for hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of people.

When I take my personal example, I am still convinced there *was* something going on with the game - highly unlikely that it was coincidence that BG3/its launcher started to crash my system right after a certain patch had come out when the PC was running smoothly (AFAIK) before that. I say "AFAIK" because things might have been crashing in the background before that without me even noticing it - I wasn't paying that close attention to things before the rig started to freeze up all the time. And just because you don't freeze up/BSoD doesn't mean your PC is running trouble free all the time.

Before those crashes started, the PC seemed stable to me ... it ran OCing stress-tests just fine (3D Mark 40 min stress-tests, Cinebench, etc) and it never crashed while playing other games. In fact, I'm very sure it never ever BSoD-ed on me or froze up before I installed BG3 and its late August update.

What it came down for me was, at first, updating everything I could think of and getting rid of a ton of bloatware (as elaborated in this thread already), then checking what exactly was crashing at what time (using Win Event-Log and Reliability Report). Plus regular runs of Windows System File Check after crashes to find and repair faults in the OS-installation-folder. Once I had eliminated the Larian Launcher by disabling it "for good", things seemed to smooth out, but then other apps started to crash the PC while BG3 was running. Which could've just been coincidence because this PC has been running nothing but BG3 after a certain time of day, every day since I bought the game in late August.

After the Launcher was out of the picture, it was things like MS Teams Updater that showed up in the error logs over and over - so I threw MS Teams off my PC - I don't use it and I don't even know how it got installed in the first place, lol. Then things smoothed out once more until about 10 days ago when I started to suffer Windows Explorer crashes. And those happened, at times, right after start-up, on the Windows Log-In screen... so there wasn't even time for me to start up BG3 (or any other app) and the game couldn't have been directly responsible.


I've put out a lot of cries for help on dedicated OS/Win boards and while I didn't get a definitive answer, the *consensus* seemed to be that all this might have something to do with my RAM and that BG3 wasn't the cause but the trigger of/for these problems. Which kinda makes sense to me, since I don't play any other super current AAA-titles besides BG3, so even though I do stuff like DCS and IL-2 in VR, perhaps those titles never taxed the system like newer games like BG3 do. Besides: I haven't gotten around to doing much flying since BG3 is taking up all my gaming-hours...

In any case: I decided to look for the easy fix and to change my RAM configuration. I built this PC last year with 2x8 GB of Corsair CL 18 DDR4 3600, then I bought another identical (on paper) kit in early 2023 and now had all four DIMM-slots populated (4x8 GB). In both configs, I was running the RAM with XMP enabled, as you do. That's two or three potential sources of instability: OCed RAM, since XMP is just a standardized overclock, mixed and matched kits and all four slots populated. Looking into this, it didn't take long to find out that while both kits were "identical" (same product ID and all), their components came from two different manufacturers - plus they weren't in the board manufacturer's compatibility list (which doesn't need to mean a lot, but still) and mixing kits that aren't sold together as a single kit also is regarded as a bit of a no-no.

Then, just for $hits and giggles, I ran a crappy in-OS memtest (not much point to those, really) ... which crashed my PC after four minutes of testing. So I bit the bullet, bought 2x16 GB G.Skill Trident Z 3600 CL16 (a kit which *is* listed as compatible by my board's manufacturer) and now my PC has been running trouble free for a week or so. It's also a bit faster because I went from CL18 to CL16..

It's still too early to call this one "fixed" and so far, I've been too lazy to memtest86 the old Corsair sticks ... but I'm semi-convinced at this point that my old RAM (or probably rather my old RAM configuration) played a part here. I might not even find any faults with the old sticks, because memtest doesn't test for compatibility, and the fact that I mixed and matched (sort of) and had four DIMMs on the board alone could've been what was causing instability issues.



S.

that does not make much courage to say it in german ...

i have a similar issue. because of your post i tested the RAM of my PC. it is a G.Skill kit with 2 x 16 Gb. Memtest86 stopped because of too many errors.

cpu, mobo, ram and psu are just a week old. on the ryzen 2 BG3 worked like a charm, no crashes, but the cpu load was at a constant 80 to 90%. now on a ryzen 7 7800x3d, the cpu seems to be bored, but BG3 crashes seconds or minutes after the RAM has around 30% of workload. i'm tryin to get an exchange to higher quality RAM from the shop i bought the stuff from. hopefully this is the issue.

the steam deck has also issues with BG3 at the moment, because it keeps starting with Vulkan, even DX11 is chosen. i have enought to do with this gg