Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems PC Freezing and Game Crashing

I've been playing BG3 for the last couple months, got over 100 hours and had no issues, but the last 2/3 days (since the hotfix #30 realistically) whenever I try to play the game it completely freezes, sometimes unfreezing and letting me carry on until it happens again but most of the time it completely freezes my PC where I can't force close from Steam, CTRL + ALT + DEL or anything. I have to force turn off my PC directly and reboot entirely.

I'm not playing with any mods and I've tested other games (Elden Ring, Horizon, Monster Hunter, Destiny 2) and these all run with no issues so I'm not sure what's causing it. I've tried both launchers (primarily I've been using DirectX 11), re-varifying game files, rolling back drivers, lowering graphics settings, and turning off my DPI scaling as per the troubleshooting but no success. The only other thing I can consider is uninstalling the game and re-installing but I don't see how this would help. As I've been having to turn off my PC completely the game itself hasn't 'crashed' so there are no crash reports, but it is still unplayable and causes the whole PC to freeze.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

It started yesterday for me. I made it to Moonrise towers without any problems over the past weeks. A few days ago, there was an update in Steam. Now, the game freezes and crashes after a short while. Both during cutscenes as during free roaming. It's no longer playable; What exactly was that update ? Can it be rolled back ?

Edit : I just received another approx. 215 KB update, but no change alas. Also, after crash I ger the crash report popup, but the send button remains disabled, I can only "close" it.

2nd edit : I found this in the eventvwr:

Toepassingsnaam met fout: bg3_dx11.exe, versie: 4.68.5.605, tijdstempel: 0x00000000
Naam van foutmodule: ucrtbase.dll, versie: 10.0.26100.3624, tijdstempel: 0x45295404
Uitzonderingscode: 0xc0000409
Foutoffset: 0x00000000000a4ace
Foutproces-id: 0x5AD4
Begintijd van foutieve toepassing: 0x1DBC4088F3798BA
Faulting-toepassingspad: D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Baldurs Gate 3\bin\bg3_dx11.exe
Faulting-modulepad: C:\WINDOWS\System32\ucrtbase.dll
Rapport-id: bf490a3d-f629-4bea-af8f-a87fd3ad9f24
Faulting-pakket volledige naam:
Faulting-pakket-relatieve toepassings-id:

It has started for me just now, after the big download. I have been having ongoing problems with Opportunity Attacks since Patch 8 but the crashes only started just now.

I retried and played for an hour without crashing now. But, I do experience a never-seen-before amount of stutter and lag when moving around.

Sadly, I was too optimistic too soon. Just crashed again.

Also still no wasy to send crash report. I can fill in a description, but not send it. Only close the form. Hope someone from support reads this forum and that Larian doesn't rely on the volume of crash reports.

Since it seems you're using DX11: Have you tried switching to Vulkan?


Also: Since you didn't state your config, I'm going to assume you're on an Nvidia GPU. I did have a couple of weird crashes (hard ones, two or three BSODs on Win 11) a few hot-fixes ago which were a complete thing of the past for me, so those were a bit of a head-scratcher. Especially since the last time those happened it turned out to be an actual hardware-problem.

This time however, it turned out that something had gone wrong with the latest NV-drivers - either a semi-botched installation or it was the drivers themselves. Which have been reported as being problematic (to put it mildly ... 576.20, IIRC). Most of the problems that I've seen reported involve 50xx-series cards - but that doesn't mean older cards cannot also run into problems with these drivers. I'm running a 4070 Super, for example.

After doing the usual cleanup stuff like running SFC, I checked the Windows crash-logs which seemed to point to some sort of driver-related issue causing this. And since the only change I had made to my system recently was that I had updated the NV-drivers on that very day, I assumed it was those that were causing the trouble.

What I did to "fix" this was re-install the drivers, using the "custom installation -> clean installation"-option(s) and leaving the boxes checked for the two other drivers the installer wants to "update". Did a restart afterwards and the crashes were gone.

Thanks for the response. Yes, I use dx11 standard, though when the crashes started , I also tried vulcan. Both from the steam launcher, but also by starting bg3_dx11.exe and bg3.exe directly. Everything kept crashing. Then the next day (and a small update later) Things looked better again, but a few hours later, fell into a state of constant crash again. I checked windows and graphics updates, nothing reporterd changes to the system . I looked at windows\system32\ucrtbase.Dll, because that library was mentioned in the eventlog fatal error message, and noticed it dates from 14/5/2025. Did the larian update also update microsoft C++ library ? Or something else did ? I have no clueif this is normal or not.

I have an nvidia graphics card, which was well into the specs when I bought the game in EA, but is now below recommended. (A GForce GTX 1660 Ti) but the only thing I noticed since full release, was that it takes a "relatively long" time to render a new location when I jump or load a save. Once that is done, there is no problem with graphics. And certainly no repeated crashes, until just a few days ago.

I now executed an SFC scan on the disk, and it found and repaired errors. Can't tell what exactly it found as the scan log is huge. But it seems I can only hope for the best and that everything will eventually return well enough to finish my PT. From a timing perspective, I remain with the idea that something broke with these small updates from steam after the last hotfix. Maybe Larian could communicate what these were exactly ?

After this hotfix, my game keeps crashing a few minutes after loading up a save. It happens both when using the Patch 7 beta and on patch 8.

After hotfix #30 regular crashes on Win10 (dx11 as well as vulcan). Completely wiping and updating the drivers didn't help. After hotfix #31 the crashes come at shorter intervals making the game unplayable for me now.

How?

I can't get the thing to even start to load now, after i deleted it and tried it will not even load just stops but shows it running in steam, i can try to play and loads the launcher then just quits only error i get is from the steam launcher " externalcrashhandler -stats 0 -modded 1"

Same issue here, after a fresh install will not even load, i have other games on steam and not and they are fine, they did something in the last patch, is there a way to revert the game to before the patch? and load a saved game?

In theory switching back to patch 7 beta in steam could work, but


Maybe with a new playthrough? Idk

Since my last message, I ran several game sessions of 20 - 30 minutes the past 2 days and didn't have any freeze or crash. (Before it didn't take more than a few minutes to crash)
I can see no trace of a new steam update since then, so I think the SFC scan did the trick.

So you migh try it, it should do no harm. (If you 've never heard of the System File Checker scan, please do look it up in google, so you can double check that it is a real command and not a devious prank from my side. You can never be too paranoid when you're on internet)

In a command prompt issue : SFC /scannow

In my case, after the scan , it displayed the message that it found and repaired corrupted files.

I'm not a windows expert, but when I saw that the error occurred in a c++ runtime library dll,and also noticed that this dll had a creation date on disk of 14/5/2025, I can imagine that one of the latest updates also installed a version of the distributable C++ library, and maybe it creates problems if you already have a version of this library on the PC. The disk scan might have repaired this. But this is a wild guess on my part of course.

The sfc scan didn't fix the crashes on my machine, although it found and repaired some issues with system files. Good to have this in the toolbox anyway.


With this I had more luck. Yesterday I saw the crash report dialog for the first time and it uploaded my 20-30 collected crash reports from disk and apparently created a ticket for each one of them (they are all the same).

To be fair, I'll add that I'm using WASD and native camera tweaks mod. But they worked fine with patch 8 until hotfix #30 came around (and I simply can't play the game without them anymore).

Any reparations will only be noticeable after a reboot of the PC, but I giess you did that.

I have natve camera mods, not WASD. There was a new version after patch 8 came out, but hotfix didn't seem to disable it after that.
IF both of these stopped working at the same time, it might be worthwhile to check if the native_mods dll was not restored to the original game version.

Thanks. Did a fresh install of the native mods and the loader as well as the c++ redistributable dependency. Now the game is playable again.

i am trying a full fresh install of the game and Steam, also reinstalled the c++ redistributable dependency, and going to see if i can start a new game, no mods or other stuff. If this doesn't work then a reinstall of the entire operating system is my next step, don't want to but i am at my end of trying to run this. and it being the only game having an issue.