I’ve seen this issue posted on the forums before but never with a solid answer as to what causes it or how to fix it. This thread is intended to be a record of an ongoing issue that multiple players are experiencing, hopefully to bring attention to it and finally get it fixed.

My partner and I have started multiple playthroughs on PC that always end in the Lower City area of Act 3. We are able to play together pretty much flawlessly up until this point, but when we enter the Lower City, it’s only a matter of time before the Guest player starts experiencing partially rendered environments, missing UI elements, T-posing characters and NPCs, or crashes in the loading screen. The Host player is able to load this area with no issues. The crashes seem to happen whenever there is a loading screen, like going from Camp to the city or leaving the sewers or a building basement and entering the large, main Lower City area.

Here is what we have tried, based on others’ suggestions and some of our own ideas, none of which has worked for us in the long-term:

-Uninstalling and reinstalling the game.

-Updating graphics drivers.

-Playing on LAN, Online, and Direct Connect.

-Launching the game with both Vulkan and DX11

-Bypassing the Larian launcher/Launching through the Larian Launcher

-Turning on Slow HDD mode, both individually and at the same time for both of us

-Lowering graphics settings for both the Host and the Guest

-Launching the game through both the BG3 Mod Manager and Steam

-Having the Host launch the game with all party members in camp, and then having the Guest join and 1.) leave camp through the "Leave Camp" button, and 2.) Fast travel to a Lower City waypoint. Neither of these methods seem to work.

-Having the Guest join the Host's game, and also having the Host invite the Guest to play via Steam

-Sending the Host’s save file to the Guest, and having the Guest load in first as the new Host. (This just ends up swapping who is having the issue. The Guest who was initially experiencing the issue can load and play with no problem, but the problem starts occurring on the original Host's computer if they load in as a Guest.)

-Having the Guest load the Host’s save file, then be invited to join a game using the same save file on the Host’s computer.

-Inviting the Guest to a save file in Act 3 that had previously been played exclusively in single player. The Guest will eventually still crash in Lower City.

Our Situation/Specs

-Both of our computers are capable of running BG3 in single player at maximum graphics settings with no issues whatsoever. I am usually the Guest when we play in multiplayer, but I have beaten the game with no similar issues whatsoever in single player. My partner as the Host has no issues loading this area on his computer, and his computer is newer/faster than mine.

-We play sitting next to each other on the same internet connection, same network etc. We don't play with a VPN enabled.

-In our most recent playthrough, we did play with mods enabled, but we have experienced this exact same issue with 2 separate playthroughs that had no mods. When we did play with mods, we made sure that we had the exact same versions of the exact same mods installed with the same load order.

We’ve been experiencing this issue since the game launched, sinking hundreds of hours into these playthroughs we can’t finish. Every time a patch comes out that promises to improve Act 3 performance, we hope that we will be able to finally finish the game together, and will usually start a new playthrough instead of loading up old “broken” saves. So far, nothing has helped and the issue persists.

Thanks for reading. If anything has worked for you that I haven’t mentioned above, let me know! We are desperate and will try anything at this point.