Randomly the game will cause my computer to crash when switching zones. It is not easy to replicate because it hap[pens randomly but it always does it when on a loading screen when switching zones. Sometime these crashes cause my character to disappear from character select screen. When I check the local file where my characters are saved I can still see them on there, but for some reason the game does not want to detect them and does not show them. I have lost all my characters like this, it is very infuriating and time wasting I stopped playing the game because of these crashes since it is a waste of time if they do not show up on the select screen.
You havent included your player.log and le_graphicsmanager.ini so I am going to have to make some assumptions / guess at what could be happening.
Usually crashes during map loading/area transitions through portals etc is caused by three main things:
game files that need to be verified to ensure that the install is not messed up
GPU drivers outdated/corrupted
performance related instability caused by in-game settings being too high for the hardwar.
Sometimes there is a more general problem on a players system but most of the time its one of the three possiblities above.
Based on your DXDIAG information:
You are using older hardware especially a GTX 970 GPU. With this hardware AND the state of the game optimisation right now, I would suggest that you should be running the game on Low or Very Low settings with an fps limit in place of less than 60fps and most special effects disabled (shadows.grass.AA etc). If you are not using these settings then its possible you are suffering from point 3 above. If this is the case, then I recommend dropping the settings down to see if this improves stability.
I am not sure what your date/time formats are so I cannot be sure what your GPU driver is dated at - 3/9/2021 - if its from Mar 21, then I would suggest an update. Also… without the player.log I cannot tell for sure if your crashes are graphics driver related but considering your problem, its probably worthwhile to reinstall your GPU drivers anyway… Please note that just running an upgrade driver installation is not good enough and doesnt always replace problem files… I recommend you use a safe mode driver reinstallation or something like DDU to be sure your driver is installed properly.
Your dxdiag diagnostics (end of the file) are not showing any serious Windows errors but you do seem to be having crashes for a wide variety of games/apps… Last Epoch errors are there - some hanging, some crashing on the game engine UnityPlayer.dll (usually GPU or game file problems). GoG Galaxy is crashing and you seem to have quite a few memory warning errors (RADAR_PRE_LEAK_64) that are usually safe to ignore but it seems like lots of apps are not shutting down properly or dont properly release their memory… Even Steam. Normal to see these kinds of errors in beta apps etc but you seem to have more than the usual…
Unfortuantely savegames can get corrupted if the game crashes when its trying to do a save… Because all savegames are local, when this happens there is no backup…
If you are using Steam cloud saves and a corruption happens, then Steam can copy the corrupted file as it has no way of knowing its messed up.
The only surefire way to make sure your savegames are ok is to make manual backups - I do this with any beta/early access game I play - this way the worst that can happen is that I lose the last playsession and not my character.
(By default on windows, all files are in Bootdrive:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\LocalLow)\Eleventh Hour Games
Thank you @vapourfire I tried decreasing the graphics to low and it crashed my computer again, this time I attached the two files you mentioned. The errors you’re seeing might be due to the sudden computer crashes that close the programs unexpectedly.
From the player.log… there are plenty of Failed To Load character with key 1CHARACTERSLOT_BETA_1/2/3/4 - this error is has something to do with the Unity game engine trying to open the savegames and finding that the file is opened/locked by some other process running on your machine… This is happening very often and seems to be causing the game quite a lot of problems to the point where this could definitely explain the crashes… Without being a Unity developer I cannot say if this error is happening when the game tries to save your progress or if its happening when you load the character… either way, this shouldnt be happening…
Are you sure that there havent been any issues with something else opening/editing/locking these files on your system? Antivirus? It could also be that when the game crashed, the crashed process still locked the file and when you restarted the game (but not the PC) it started having problems.
I would suggest that you, with the game not running:
Make a backup of your Last Epoch folder with all the savegames, filters and settings. The entire folder…
disable Steam cloud for last epoch if you are using it.
delete the le_graphicsmanager.ini (and its .bak file) and all files in the savegame and filters subfolders.
Verify the game files through steam.
Restart the game - you should have no savegames and hopefully with the default graphics settings, the game should launch…
Then immediately before making a new character, update the graphic details to very low as above
Then create a brand new character and play for a while to see if the game is stable or still crashing.
If this seems more stable, then it could be that your savegames are so corrupted they are crashing the game…
And I don’t it’s only with this game that my computer hard crashes, that’s why I’m so confused by all of this. I’ll try your recommendations and hopefully it works. Thank you for your replies!
Edit: It crashed again after your recommendations. Here are the logs. Thank you for your help, but I think this is not fixable. Too bad since I really enjoyed the game. le_graphicsmanager.ini (489 Bytes) Player.log (35.4 KB)
From the latest player.log… there are no further savegame errors… so that part of the the problem seems to have been resolved…
There are also zero crash notifications other other errors in the player.log - i.e. the game is not registering any crashes…
This probably means that the game is either hanging (i.e. not crashing) or some other event on your system is causing the crashes/hanging before the game itself can register something going wrong.
From a purely LE perspective, maybe some other application you are running at the same time as playing could be affecting LE… (and there are apps that do - like Citrix) - a way to test this is simply not to run or disable any other applications temporarily while testing LE.
Third party conflicts aside, if you have verified the game files, and done a clean GPU driver installation then the only other thing to do is to see what else is happening on your system - something to explain your comments about your system crashing for other games too…
Viewing Reliability History & Windows Error Logs on your machine will give you the errors that Windows is able to record and might give you some idea of what is going wrong…
Other possibilities that might not throw up errors but can cause crashes are things like:
thermals - i.e. components get too hot and shutdown to protect themselves. This can be from fan failures, dirty cases, failing AIOs, bad heatsink seating or simply bad airflow in your case.
power delivery - the PSU or other power components on the motherboard are failing and when power demand is high - like playing a game - they fail and the system just shuts down/restarts.
component failure - maybe a harddrive is failing or the CPU/GPU themselves are failing - this does happen… Especially with older hardware… I have had this happen on old GPUs, harddrives and even a faulty power switch… Windows didnt log any errors but the systems involved crashed or rebooted for no apparent reason during use and it was pretty hard to trace the issues.
third party applications/device drivers are conflicting - these usually throw up an error that windows records and that you can find, but sometimes a conflict at a driver level can cause Windows to crash/reboot…
My advice to you would be to view your Windows error logs and try and find anything that could indicate what is going on. I would also recommend that you run some stress tests on your system - things like Furmark, Prime95, Heaven, Cinebench and other benchmark tools to see if you can force the system to crash while monitoring it to see if you can figure out what is happening… Stress testing is abnormal for a computer but it helps replicate system crashes outside of something like a game/beta like LE where its more complicated to isolate.
Thank you for all the help. I changed my PSU and the crashes are gone, I guess it was just time to change it. Now I can run the game at any video quality, no crashes.
in my initial reply… I’ll forgive you for missing it cause I tend to be pretty verbose…