Every time I use the helm of the Mindflayer ship, cutscene plays fine, loading screen into next cutscene, then it crashes, whether I try to let the cutscene play or spam Spacebar to skip it.

AMD Ryzen 5 2600 3.4 GHz
Radeon RX570
16 gigs RAM

Same here, happened once during the cutscene and second time during the progress bar preparing for the cutscene.

Intell i5-6400 2,7 GHz
Nvidia GTX 760
8GB ram

Having the same issue. Attempted 3 times, first time it loaded as soon as the loading bar got to the end, 2nd time when I got about 2 seconds into the cutscene, 3rd time I was about 10 seconds into the cutscene before it happened. Gonna continue trying because it seemed like I was getting farther the more I tried.

I am also seeing this issue. I might try and reduce graphical settings, I was crashing at opening cinematic till I locked framerate to 60.

I saw somewhere else about switching to dx11 vs vulkan to fix some things. Going to try that.

That allowed me past.

Ok switching to DX11 (gear next to play button in the larian launcher) allowed me to get past the fight, but it crashed in the following scene,

It seems that capping my framerate at 60 doesn't fix the problem. Next step I took was to drop my graphics settings all the way to the lowest setting they could go, the default "very low". I guess this somehow skips the entire cinematic that occurs after the loading screen and you're set into the next area right away, so I'm not entirely sure if it actually fixed the issue or not, but I was at least able to get past it.

So, after reading all the suggestions here, I played around with it.

Switching between DX11 and Vulkan didn't help me.

Changed settings to ultra low, was able to get through cut scene, turned back up to ultra and started walking around. *Crashed*

Changed graphics settings to High. Crashed.

Changed graphic settings to Medium. Held up for 2 minutes of running around but I needed to get off the computer.

This is kinda ridiculous, I can play much more graphically intensive games on higher graphic settings. But hey, if Medium lets me play...

Having same issue, except I'm seeing it more often after and before this cut scene.

Windows up-to-date. Nvidia 1070ti up-to-date.

Switched from using Vulkan to DX11 almost immediately.

All settings on medium.

Tried changing settings in Discord, NVIDIA control panel, verified install integrity on Steam, nothing working.

Having the same crash when using Vulkan; using DX11 gets me through the load, but something bugs out with the subsequent cutscene - I am able to move around, but the game thinks I am mid-dialogue (and resultingly won't allow saves). I am unable to interact with anything, including the I am presumably supposed to be speaking to.

I have a similar problem on Stadia where the second cutscene never plays I just start on the beach. When it happens I am not able to save game it is darkened out and says a party member is in a dialog but thats when I dont even have a party yet. Finally when I pick up items like the clam or the fisherman corpse I cant loot the item and I cant walk away or do anything. I become stuck. I had to replay the transponder fight over 3 times and then it finally loaded properly with second cutscene and able to save and pick up items. Very frustrating as this was my first experience with BG3. I know EA but still frustrating...

Same problem here, tried running as administrator, updated drivers and vredist, nothing worked. Messing with graphical settings allowed me to get through the cutscene once by putting eerything on very low, but on second attempt it crashed. I've got GeForece 1060, i7-7700HQ and 16gb ram, and something seems to be choking up on the second map even though it should not.

Same problem here. Never made to the beach. Lowering everything just made the falling ship cutscene visible for a few seconds then crash again. I tried also switching character before using transponders, nothing worked. I suppose I'll wait for an hotfix.

Switching from Vulkan to DX11 got me off of the helm and onto the beach, after 3 crashes. I'll post here again if I experience more crashes to verify whether it is a long term fix or not.

I actually managed to get through the helm, only do discover that it's the Wilderness map that actually crashes the game when loading. I must load it on freshly restarted PC, on lowest settings, can play for a bit, and then the game will inevitably crash again. Something weird is going on with resource management I think.

Okay, new day, started testing again. I've been on the beach for a while but I went back to an old save after switching to DX11 with maxed settings to see if I could get through the cutscene, and I could not get any farther into it than I did before. Plus the game seems to look a hair worse so I just switched back to Vulkan (no real major difference, pick whichever you like best.)

It must be something about the areas outside of the beginning tutorial ship that's causing the game to crash with max settings, as it doesn't happen even once throughout the entire area, only during the cutscene and anything past it seemingly at random.

All of my settings consist of:

2560 x 1440 (16:9) 144hz
Borderless
Vsync Disabled
Framerate Capped at 144hz (ive tried capping it at 60 and uncapping it, neither changed the result
Overall Preset is on Ultra

I've now attempted to play the game by turning off one setting at a time and getting as far as I could. So far I'm down to everything to the lowest setting itll go (or off) except for
Model Quality, Instance Distance, Texture Quality and Texture filtering.

I turned Texture Quality down to Very Low and was able to play the game for about 15-20 minutes (everything else is back to max settings), which is much longer than it usually took before it crashed before. I had to stop there because I've got things to do, but I will continue testing it by increasing the quality until it crashes again, and then setting it to max and dropping the quality of the other 3 options and see if that prevents the crash as well. It's like the game itself can't handle it own graphics so it crashes.

Encountering the same problem here. When I used the transponder with the companion(while my char was downed) the game was stuck loading after the cutscene forever(tried twice). No crash though.

The game simply crashes at about 30% loading if I use it when both are alive. The one time I used DX11, it crashed at the loading screen(after using transponder) too. I am playing on my laptop at potato settings, originally thought it was a problem related to that.

I've narrowed the problem down to two things:

1) The bigger Wilderness map loading causes some major issue that crashes the game. The only workaround that I found to fix stuff for me is to restart my PC, don't turn anything on except BGIII, drop everything to very low then load. This usually works and the map loads. Then I can change the settings back to Ultra and I can play....

2)... but there's another thing - playing the game for 30-40 minutes on Ultra will inevitably crash the game. Also I just crashed on another cutscene in a particular dungeon after pressing one of the buttons in there, but I have no clue if the crash was due to playing for 30 minutes or the cutscene that triggered.

So my best guess is that the game has some sort of issue with CPU/RAM usage. I've got i7 7700 HQ and 16 GB of RAM, so there shouldn't be any problems, my load on both isn't very high when playing (around 30-60% on both). The game clearly can be handled by my laptop, but some sort of issue is maybe cause mishandling of RAM and this leads to the crash? It's pretty telling because if I use the PC for a bit, or already crashed, I cannot load Wilderness map anymore even when using very low settings.

I think that for me that might be the underlying issue, not some particular spot of the map or particular cinematic. Perhaps cinematics push the game resource usage higher than normal game play and this is why it crashes on them so often.

[quote]So my best guess is that the game has some sort of issue with CPU/RAM usage. I've got i7 7700 HQ and 16 GB of RAM, so there shouldn't be any problems, my load on both isn't very high when playing (around 30-60% on both). The game clearly can be handled by my laptop, but some sort of issue is maybe cause mishandling of RAM and this leads to the crash? It's pretty telling because if I use the PC for a bit, or already crashed, I cannot load Wilderness map anymore even when using very low settings.[/quote]

I think this may be my problem right here, my game runs perfectly on ultra with no problems or lag whatsoever, and then it will crash randomly like clockwork every 10 or so minutes. It didn't crash at all in the beginning of the game (on the ship), and then started crashing when I got to the larger wilderness map. It will crash at literally any time, during cutscenes, combat, or even on one occasion while I was just standing there checking a text message. My computer is working harder to run it than it does some games but I shouldn't be having as many crashes as I am, so I think it's an issue with the game processing.

Still having same issue after patch today.

So I've managed to rein in the crashing a bit. First of all I've rolled back my drivers to version 451.67, as it seemed to help in some crash cases. I start Dx11 version, and I play on high maximum. This allows me to load the game and play for around 20-40 minutes, untill it will inevitably crash again. It is possible that the fix helped a little bit.

A crude solution but I can at least experience the game. No idea if it will work for others

I decided I would just play on medium, got through the first fight with the little mind beasts in the crashed ship on the beach, leveled up, went to level up my character... crashed. Repeated and same effect. Timing was much shorter the second time as I just ran right to the fight to test it. So at least for me it doesn't seem time based, it's triggered.

Interestingly, after the hotfix, the game seems to finish loading(bar filled) as opposed to about 30% progress for me before crashing on Vulcan. Will try on DX11 and update this post.

Edit: DX11 crashing too.

In regards to original post, this also happens on my machine.
Windows is updated and rtx2070 updated
Will try patch and other settings mentioned when I get home later.

MB: ASUS ROG Strix Z390-I
CPU: Intel core is 9700
MEM: x2 - Corsair Vengeance LPX 8GB 2666MHz CL16 DDR4
VID: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070

Okay after further tinkering I'm certain that in my case, the RAM usage is an issue. I literally have to have at least 13GB of ram free in order to load in the Wilderness map, when I have Chrome in the background and the free RAM is around 10-11 GB it will crash. I've also assigned some Page File to my drive C since I had that at 0, but I don't know if it will further stabilize the game - maybe I will be able to play for more than 30 minutes at a time.

The funny thing is, it's not like Baldur is taking up the RAM - the average load is around 50% when I'm playing, so I don't know what the hell is going on with those free 8GB.

I had no crashes so far, I've checked my Ram usage only once (didn't paid attention out of excitement ) it was over 8gb which is quite much i guess. Though it may be only caching when it found free space or EA garbage collection could be bad.

Ok I was able to choose Medium quality settings to get to the beach area, however, choosing Camp from the map screen made it crash.
On a lighter note im actually loving the game and reckon it will be so awesome in the future ♡

Quoting Shane Moffatt from Steam forums:



This also works for me, so maybe it will fix your game as well. Ain't gonna hurt to try.

Good find Ratzing, this allowed me to get to the next (crashing ship) cutscene. Eventually crashed during it though. . . Does look like it's a RAM isse, sad that my measly 12 gigs isn't enough even on low/medium settings at 720p.

So I've had a few more crashes along the way from landing on the beach. One at the people trying to save the mindflayer, which I got past with a reload, but can't get past a crash when we meet Gale. ♡

16GB RAM here, does not seem to be enough to load the map after the transponder cutscene. I don't really have 20GB free on my SSD that I could use to increase virtual memory. This is kinda stupid because 16GB of RAM had been well enough for every single game until Baldur's Gate 3.

It all seems to work find with Medium quality settings for now.

Having same issue. downloaded the hotfix today. no change. downloaded new gefore drivers. no change. trying on very low settings. verified game files. virus checked my computer. ran as admin. dx11 and vulkan. nothing helps. been stuck here for over a week.

I'm having this problem, too. I'm on a Mid-2019 MBP, AMD Radeon 5500M, 8-core, 32gb memory. Have tried a number of different graphics setting and made sure nothing is running in the background.

Same issue here. Complete system crash, forced kernel reboot when activating transponder. This is happening on Steam after Patch #3 and I'm running a 2020 Macbook Pro with 16G Ram, Intel Iris Plus Graphics (all significntly better than both Minimum and Recommended specs).

Since this is still being reported since first release and has continued across 3 patches, I'd venture to say this qualifies as a major issue.

Just want to chime in I have the exact same issue, and the ram increase fix posted here sort of does fix it, at the expense of 20gb virtual memory increase so yeah...