Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Lower City Load Crash

Based on this description I'm reasonably confident that you do NOT have the same issue as others in this thread! If you did I wouldn't expect the loading progress to get past 33%.

Instead it sounds more like a graphics crash - or at least some issue with your specific system hardware / OS / game installation. Probably related to the optimisations in Patch 3 that were intended to improve game performance in the Lower City.

Same issue in the creche; game crashes at 33% when leaving camp. Probably due to the same bug as the lower city one (a body somewhere in Act 1 has been healed above 0 HP), I think it happened in the underdark. This is super annoying, do we know anything about the next patch?

Yeah you made me secondguess myself for a bit there because I *think* but not 100% certain others have mentioned transition issues at places other than 33%. so just in case I just went through the whole routine again of trying to debug the issue if it is in fact on my side. But I just can't even fathom what it would be on my end to make it crash in the exact same way at the exact same time every time. I know it's not a graphics thing because I switched that down to the lowest settings, 30 FPS cap and windowed instead of fullscreen, still EXACTLY the same as my "real" settings, on both the DX11 and Vulkan clients. I tried to use the dump files (I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to debugging the specific issue) but the only thing that jumps out at me (again, it might not even be relevant) was this line from the dump file analysis (I used Windbg for this):

"ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0xc0000005 The instruction at 0x%p referenced memory at 0x%p. The memory could not be %s." I know it's not my rig's memory because I ran my afterburner/RTSS overlay to keep up with all the important levels at the moment of the crash, and nothing spiked or anything as far as I could tell. Anyways, to help me and maybe others out while we wait for the patch, can others check and see if they get this error from the dump file in "...steamapps\common\Baldurs Gate 3\bin"? I think you have to run the game through Larian's launcher in order for the dump files to show up. Then just free download Windbg and open it with that

Created this account to join in on the conversation like so many others. First of all thank everyone so much for all your information.
This bug has made it impossible for me to play for the past four days at least but I’m convinced my saves must have been corrupted much earlier (probably at least two weeks ago). I just never noticed it because I didn’t need to leave the Lower City.
I’ve read every single post in this thread and my problem is very similar but there’s a few things specific to my problem that I haven’t read here before.
I first encountered the bug after finishing the Iron Throne quest. I finished it normally but when I was back in the Lower City and saved (!) the game crashed immediately. No loading, just immediate crash after pressing save. I repeated this several times until I understood that the saving is the problem. My game doesn’t crash when switching locations/maps like it does for everyone else, it’s ALWAYS when saving (both manual save and quicksave) after leaving a location/map. But aside from that I have the exact same experience with the bug.
I went back into a quicksave during the Iron Throne fight and noticed one of Mizora’s spiders that was already dead still as an icon among the active enemies. (Probably one of the dead enemies whose HP haven’t dropped >0.) I decided to ignore the quest for now and went into an old save.
Next I did the Free Oscar quest and when I noticed a ghost enemy dying in a weird visual way I saved and the game crashed immediately again. I started googling and found reddit posts and this thread and started my hunt for undead enemies.
I have NOT done the quests Iron Throne, Steelwatcher Foundry, House of Hope, House of Grief, Cazador, Ansur, basically any big quests that take long or require me to leave the Lower City map, that’s probably why I hadn’t noticed the bug earlier. I also never had to travel out of Lower City because I had finished any quests aside from Dribbles, Ansur and Gortash.
I have done the Hag quest but I saved every possessed NPC and the girl and only killed Ethel so none of those NPCs are bugged. I went back to any scene of fights I could remember to look for „undead“ enemies and actually discovered that Sarevok was dead and still had 23 HP left. I killed him but this didn’t fix my bug. I can’t find any other undead corpses in the Lower City or Rivington.
I haven’t killed any steel watchers aside from the two next to the boat close to the Umberlee Temple (they attacked me without warning when I stepped onto the boat) but their HP are 0 so they are not bugged.
The only other out of the ordinary thing I remember noticing before learning about the bug was at Felogyr’s Fireworks. One of the enemies, the chemist, glitched while dying. He was dead and his HP were 0 but his model hovered over his dead body on the ground. I went back but everybody there is definitely dead-dead and mostly despawned. Only the Flaming Fists in the area are weirdly aggressive. They accuse me of trespassing even when I’m OUTSIDE on the streets next to the Fireworks shop.
When I travel from Lower City to Rivington and back to the Lower City I do NOT experience the crash immediately like everyone else, I have to SAVE but then the game crashes immediatley. That’s the only big difference I found. I can fast-travel within Lower City and save after that just fine without crashes as long as I don’t leave the map. I can also travel back to Rivington and save there without crashes. The crashes only happen 100% when re-entering Lower City and then saving. (And as I mentioned I generally can’t save after leaving the Lower City map such as for Iron Throne quest. Same would probably happen with House of Hope quest but I haven’t tried yet. Also the game will apparently crash randomly while saving during/after fights such as the Oscar quest so I’m not hopeful that I can do Steel Watch Foundry, Cazador etc.)
At this point the game is completely bugged and I can’t finish it because I can’t kill Gortash and save afterwards. I could possibly beat the game by finishing it without saving and just fighting Gortash and the end boss. But the game’s auto-saving before big events will probably crash my game anyways and I really don’t want to finish my run without having done the companions quests.
I have tested all of my saves from the past five days but haven’t yet found one that isn’t bugged.
Btw this is my second run. I finished my first run on October 1. and never encountered this bug. I played both runs with mods but of course we all know this bug has nothing to do with mods at this point. I play on PC, Steam, with Gforce. Haven’t sent any reports to Larian yet aside from the crash reporter ones that open automatically after the game crashes. I’d love to support this whole situation but from what I learned in this thread I can’t send my files to Larian if I use Gforce.

Since I posted this I have finally found the last save before the corruption and it is in fact right before the Sarevok fight. I loaded the first corrupted save after the fight, reduced his HP to 0 and even put him in a chest in camp but returning to Lower City and then saving still crashes the game. I honestly don't understand why I can't fix this by killing him properly because it seems to have worked for a lot of people. Anyhow I'm just glad I found a working save again. This loses me a whole 7 days and roughly 24 hours of playing the game. I'm probably gonna skip all the side quests and only do main and companion quests and just finish the run because I'm completely fed up at this point.

Edit: I sent Larian a bug report with my first corrupted lsv file attached. I'm happy that I could hopefully contribute a little bit. Let's see if I get a reply. At least I tried.

Tried to do the iron throne, still crashed at 33% afterwards...

Well things are actually pretty Bad in Act 3 i already saw a BUNCH of reports just in this act here.. and reddit..
i just can tell yu guys one thing.. i Know it Sux becouse im doing this since 3.0 came out..
but its best to just wait untill they Say something or at least drop the Next Hotfix or patch wich i beleave will come next Mounth.
Yeah im almost a Mounth now without been able to play becouse i evrytime i try to start a new game i found new game braking Bugs.. pretty Shitty experience.

Bruh I haven't been able to play in a litteral month. This fucking sucks

This is fucking absurd. No answer from Larian dev, nothing.. Can't play the game since one week. I want to take my car (I live in East france) and go to Larian studio in Belgium and scream at them that I want a fucking refund. Stop drinking beers please and make a patch.

They were quick enough to respond to the South Park jibe though...

Just ran into this bug, and cant finish the game because if it. Was really looking forward to beating the game tomorrow. I've sent in a bug report with my save file. I don't have any mods installed, and have not attempted to mod BG3 at all yet (holding off until official mod support)

it blows my mind that the same company can be like, here let's make this amazing, genuinely once-in-a-generation experience that's so captivating that no one will want to put down and then, in only a matter of weeks after its release, willingly release an all-but-automatically added patch that barely adds anything positive but introduces an actual game-breaking bug that players can't possibly know about until it's wayyyyy too late and not even acknowledge its existence to prevent even more players having their saves ruined by it. Patch 3 has been live now for 5 weeks, and for them to allow this much time to pass...it's like an entirely different company took over than the one that actually developed the game.

If they had simply acknowledged the issue within like, the first week or so I would have been able to cut my losses and just roll back to the previous version and play on that without it being TOO much of a loss of progress and just wait until they can figure out whatever they've been taking well over a month to figure out to update. As it stands right now, I can't even find a save from my mid-Act 3 playthrough that hasn't been corrupted by it, and I can't just shrug that amount of progress off

I'm assuming patch 4 will come out next week. They've been play-testing it for pver a week now. Let's hope it includes a fix for this bug (and some of the other major patch 3 bugs).

Small update: I reloaded a manual save I had right before the Iron Throne. I've been save scumming to check when I get the crash, and I can travel between the two regions so far. Haven't re fought Gortash and Ansur yet, but at this point I'm pretty convinced it was the Steel Watch Factory that broke it for me, because I killed a lot of Watchers before they could detonate previously, and purposefully let them explode on this run to try to avoid the bug. P.S Larian really needs to work on the A.I for The Gondians, because if I didn't have survival instinct on my main character, and a couple Dimension door scrolls left, all of the Gondians would have died, because they kept running right into the Steel Watch explosion radius for literally no reason.

In the testing I've done, I found the Steel Watchers were the main culprit for the 33% crash. I know others in the forum have reported some other enemies causing the issue, but I genuinely think it's the Steel Watchers self destruct that is causing the bulk of the problems.

Finally got back to where I was previously, and my run has been salvaged. Hopefully by patch 4 Larian will have finally fixed this issue, because it is way too easy to run into this game ending bug, and threes no way to even realize it is game ending until it is way too late. If I didn't think to make a manual save prior to the Steelwatch Factory that would have been it.

Coming back to the thread, been roughly about a month and a half or so with this bug. Been slowly progressing through a Durge file while waiting on my original 1st playthrough. Hopefully, there will be some some movement especially before the holiday season kicks off.

Got about 172 hrs. or so invested between them.

The game is a broken product I don't want to give up on. I love the story and work that was put into it.

Best to everyone in the thread.

So as someone who has been a frequent visitor of this forum since this bug landed. I would like to point something out.

We have had responses from Larian, they're in our emails.

BG3 Support
Tue, Oct 17, 8:15?PM
to me

Hi there,

Thank you for notifying us about this problem.
This a known issue and our team is already investigating it, we aim to fix it in an upcoming update.

Regards,
Andres

Literally copy pasted the email to me. They're aware of the issue. I did already post this in a previous post already. Give them time. As someone who was increasingly frustrated by this the only thing I wanted was a bit of acknowledgement that they understand it's not due to mods or anything WE'VE done. Which they did.

I literally had to go as far as uninstalling because I wanted to play other things while they fixed the said problem (Tiny amount of memory on the SSD) So yes I do understand the frustration. Even as far as arguing with people on a twitter thread over this whole thing. However as mentioned, give them time. Trust me.. I know it's annoying. More than anyone knows.

Patch 4 fixed the issue for me, after a literal month of waiting. Anyone else?

ED: It's important to note that when changing zones, it stays stuck in 33% for some minutes (enough to give me a heart attack) but after that it continues. So it's clear it's doing "something" during that time.

Same here, takes a while to load but eventually does!

Update: Turns out Gauntlet Edwynna was wrecking my save as she's seemingly been resurrected now. And here I was blaming the Steel Watch...