Game crashing.

[Capibarello Cocossini]

I bought the game yesterday and everything was going fine until I had to enter inside Kaer Morhen in the tutorial, the game crashes every single time I try to enter. I can't save the game before entering also because the game crashes. I've tried verifying game files, changing video settings and looking up other fixes but nothing has helped. If anyone has had the same problem as me and fixed it, please tell me how you did it.

[Rudi-v]

I had an identical problem, and it's possible that you have some corrupted saves. The following steps are what worked for me. Steam 'cloud' saves can get corrupted very easily, so if you haven't already tried this, FIRST you should disable your 'steam cloud saves sync' feature, and THEN delete all except your last half-dozen or so saves----the game also tends to run poorly if you have a lot of saves in your gamesaves folder----then try running the game again. You might have to use an earlier save than your latest one, as the last one, if it's an 'auto-save' might still be bad. Hopefully this will have solved your issue.

[Capibarello Cocossini]

You misunderstood, I don't have a save nor can I make one, the game crashes when I try to make a save of the game, and I can't get past a certain point in the tutorial. I wanted to check if its a steam related issue as well so I purchased the game on gog.com. Playing the gog.com version did nothing, I still crash at the exact same spot and also can't make a save. The game is literally unplayable on my PC.

[Rudi-v]

Originally posted by KaHn:

You misunderstood, I don't have a save nor can I make one, the game crashes when I try to make a save of the game, and I can't get past a certain point in the tutorial. I wanted to check if its a steam related issue as well so I purchased the game on gog.com. Playing the gog.com version did nothing, I still crash at the exact same spot and also can't make a save. The game is literally unplayable on my PC.

Gotcha. but you should still try disabling the 'steam cloud saves sync' feature, if you haven't tried that yet, and then try playing again, just in case there's an issue with that feature.

[Capibarello Cocossini]

Originally posted by Rudi-v:

Originally posted by KaHn:

You misunderstood, I don't have a save nor can I make one, the game crashes when I try to make a save of the game, and I can't get past a certain point in the tutorial. I wanted to check if its a steam related issue as well so I purchased the game on gog.com. Playing the gog.com version did nothing, I still crash at the exact same spot and also can't make a save. The game is literally unplayable on my PC.

Gotcha. but you should still try disabling the 'steam cloud saves sync' feature, if you haven't tried that yet, and then try playing again, just in case there's an issue with that feature.

Unfortunately it did not work.

[Seamus, That's the Dog]

Seems to be similar issue to the one in this thread:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/20900/discussions/0/864975026790425356/
Try applying the 4GB VRAM patch linked in that thread to the game's exectuable file
Also try disabling the Steam overlay when playing the game and running it in windowed mode (or borderless windowed if you have a software that can force that)

[Capibarello Cocossini]

Originally posted by Seamus, That's the Dog:

Seems to be similar issue to the one in this thread:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/20900/discussions/0/864975026790425356/
Try applying the 4GB VRAM patch linked in that thread to the game's exectuable file
Also try disabling the Steam overlay when playing the game and running it in windowed mode (or borderless windowed if you have a software that can force that)

I already tried both and it did not fix my problem.

[FubarHouse]

Well, I was actually very surprised to learn this game's stability holds up really well in Linux. If you have a linux system lying around I'd strongly recommend it.

[Capibarello Cocossini]

Originally posted by FubarHouse:

Well, I was actually very surprised to learn this game's stability holds up really well in Linux. If you have a linux system lying around I'd strongly recommend it.

Unfortunately I do not but thanks for the suggestion.

[JohnofWem]

I had the same problem. The last time I played this was with Windows XP and the saves then were in C:\Users\(User)\Documents. Security permissions in XP were off by default . Trouble is with Windows 10 security permissions are on by default. So the files in the Witcher save folder are read only.
Either trying to read the old saves or write a new save causes an error; writing crashes the game and reading says the save is corrupt. There is an autosave round about the time you specify.
To get round this start Windows as an administrator, find the System folder (which points to the path above, open this, find The Witcher\saves and change its properties to read only switched off.
It now works perfectly on my 3840 x 2160 screen but with save to cloud off.
I find Windows 10 annoying. I can see why it needs to have permissions on by default in a business situation but why can't you just switch it all off if it is just you with your PC and no-one else?

[Capibarello Cocossini]

Originally posted by johnofwem:

I had the same problem. The last time I played this was with Windows XP and the saves then were in C:\Users\(User)\Documents. Security permissions in XP were off by default . Trouble is with Windows 10 security permissions are on by default. So the files in the Witcher save folder are read only.
Either trying to read the old saves or write a new save causes an error; writing crashes the game and reading says the save is corrupt. There is an autosave round about the time you specify.
To get round this start Windows as an administrator, find the System folder (which points to the path above, open this, find The Witcher\saves and change its properties to read only switched off.
It now works perfectly on my 3840 x 2160 screen but with save to cloud off.
I find Windows 10 annoying. I can see why it needs to have permissions on by default in a business situation but why can't you just switch it all off if it is just you with your PC and no-one else?

Unfortunately this did not work for me either...

[itsthemarcel]

I have the same problem and I haven't found a workaround yet. The game was fine up until I tried to move into the front doors of the keep, then every time I tried to go through the doors the game would crash.

However, I first installed the game with a few other games, I tried uninstalling it then reinstalling it by itself and it worked fine and I played for an hour or so and it had no problems. Then I installed a bunch of new games and now it is crashing again when I try to play.

I don't really know anything about software or programming but have a feeling there may be some files like a windows redistributable that may be altered when you install other games.

I will try giving permission for the saved games tomorrow and then try reinstalling it and see if either of them work. I'm sure there are other threads out there but I haven't looked around much. Half an hour on Google wasn't very helpful though.

[Capibarello Cocossini]

Originally posted by itsthemarcel:

I have the same problem and I haven't found a workaround yet. The game was fine up until I tried to move into the front doors of the keep, then every time I tried to go through the doors the game would crash.

However, I first installed the game with a few other games, I tried uninstalling it then reinstalling it by itself and it worked fine and I played for an hour or so and it had no problems. Then I installed a bunch of new games and now it is crashing again when I try to play.

I don't really know anything about software or programming but have a feeling there may be some files like a windows redistributable that may be altered when you install other games.

I will try giving permission for the saved games tomorrow and then try reinstalling it and see if either of them work. I'm sure there are other threads out there but I haven't looked around much. Half an hour on Google wasn't very helpful though.

I installed all the Witcher games one after the other, maybe its possible that, that is the problem, I'll uninstall the two other games today and leave a reply if it helped me.

[itsthemarcel]

Originally posted by KaHn:

Originally posted by itsthemarcel:

I have the same problem and I haven't found a workaround yet. The game was fine up until I tried to move into the front doors of the keep, then every time I tried to go through the doors the game would crash.

However, I first installed the game with a few other games, I tried uninstalling it then reinstalling it by itself and it worked fine and I played for an hour or so and it had no problems. Then I installed a bunch of new games and now it is crashing again when I try to play.

I don't really know anything about software or programming but have a feeling there may be some files like a windows redistributable that may be altered when you install other games.

I will try giving permission for the saved games tomorrow and then try reinstalling it and see if either of them work. I'm sure there are other threads out there but I haven't looked around much. Half an hour on Google wasn't very helpful though.

I installed all the Witcher games one after the other, maybe its possible that, that is the problem, I'll uninstall the two other games today and leave a reply if it helped me.

Its not about uninstalling the other two games, they will have already altered the files. If you reinstall the original game it will reinstall the files it needs and if that is actually the problem it should fix it. My guess is there is a file for the C+ redistributable that might be required that gets updated or replaced by newer games...but I have no idea.

Im going to try the 4gb patch tomorrow as well.

Also, I don't know about the game engine and what it uses or needs but I know mass effect 1 had a problem and needed an old physx legacy driver that only came out with older versions of windows so that may be worth trying.

[Aoi Blue]

Originally posted by itsthemarcel:

Originally posted by KaHn:

I installed all the Witcher games one after the other, maybe its possible that, that is the problem, I'll uninstall the two other games today and leave a reply if it helped me.

Its not about uninstalling the other two games, they will have already altered the files. If you reinstall the original game it will reinstall the files it needs and if that is actually the problem it should fix it. My guess is there is a file for the C+ redistributable that might be required that gets updated or replaced by newer games...but I have no idea.

Im going to try the 4gb patch tomorrow as well.

Also, I don't know about the game engine and what it uses or needs but I know mass effect 1 had a problem and needed an old physx legacy driver that only came out with older versions of windows so that may be worth trying.

There are several issues.

Looking that it works on Wine/Proton under Linux perfectly and not Windows 10 leads a few most likely possibilities.

First, It may be initializing the gamesaves directory wrong. It could be crashing when creating your first autosave file. For this, go and check the permissions on the directory it created. It might have created them with the wrong permissions.

Second possibility is you could be missing some of the older windows runtimes as wine Includes these, but Microsoft presumes you will install them as needed.

Here are the two most likely cases. You want to download the x64 versions which will install both x64 and x86-32 versions.
DirectX 9 and 10:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35
Visual C++ 2005 runtime:
(Microsoft VC Runtime 8.0)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=26347

It is noted that the large memory aware 4G patch might be necessary, as Proton applies the same patch by default to all applications unless blacklisted these days (or more accurately, it ignores the bit changed by the patch to enable access to memory above 2GB).

Also, you probably want to check that your GPU driver panel isn't set to put any overrides to game graphic stacks. This can crash some older games.

Specifically, Temporal Anti-aliasing, Super-Scaler Anti-Aliasing, and Aniso overrides tend to cause issues. They increase the number of copies of things stored in the GPU memory, and thus increase the GPU memory size used by the game in manners the developers did not anticipate. This can cause crashes. I recommend against using GPU panel overrides on anything but the power handling behavior of the GPU when dealing with older games.

It might be an issue with Wine under Linux, but I found the game runs smoother and more stable with 8x aniso, It somehow lets you set aniso to non-power of two up to 16x. I don't recommend non-powers-of-two, as they can screw with the algorithm, and generally these older games don't play nice with aniso settings over 8x for some reason.

[itsthemarcel]

I tried a few things and I dont know what it was that fixed things but the game is working fantastically now. I assume it was the direct x legacy patch because aside from not crashing the game is far smoother and there is no lag.

I installed the Direct X legacy drivers for 9 and 10.

I disabled cloud saves.

I went into the save folder for the witcher and changed it from read only.

I dont know what it was that fixed the problem because I did all three before testing it but the game has been running for a few hours perfectly.

-
-
Note: I haven't installed the 4gb mod.
If I encounter more issues I will try it but right now the game runs just fine.