The Following crashing really damn bad.

[Ózzy]

I've been playing The Following without issues for a good 10 hours now until reaching the "Ally" trust level, with 53% of the story done. Since then, the game has been crashing everytime i load up the save and do anything for around 1-5 minutes.

And i'm not talking about simple crashes to desktop, no. I'm talking about hard pc crashes. Like, the game freezes up, keeps repeating its audio, the audio turns into a garbled mess and then my pc shuts down. I've never had this issue before, the main game plays just fine and every other game i own also runs just fine. Confirmed this by booting up some other steam games and also by spending a few hours on BF1. Cpu temps are also fine (60ºC) since i own a water cooler. For some reason, only The Following seems to be doing this. Already tried updating cpu/gpu drivers and nothing changed.

Specs:

Intel I3 9350kf
Asrock H310CM-HG4 (updated bios 4.20)
Asus Nvidia GTX 1070TI
2x8gb Pichau Team Group T-Force Vulcan DDR4 3000MHz
PSU Pichau Gaming Nidus 500W Bronze 80 Plus

Nothing here is over/underclocked. Everything up to date.

Any help?

[Damien]

You should stress test your system with something like Prime95. See if it really is stable. The game zombie physics make it CPU extensive where other titles like BF1 clearly are not, but GPU dependable titles with big in house AAA engines made sure they run on every platform running them console or pc.

Your PC also doesn't need to be overclocked for your problems to occur. Might simply be a undervoltage situation, many mobo combos can simply ♥♥♥♥ up proper voltages. So stress test that system, if it fails we know, if it runs a good loop several hours, we know more again. After that I would do DDU uninstall for the drivers and if that doesn't work simply just reset W10 and reinstall it from the MS cloud. Format C ! FTW !

EDIT: what speed is your memory setup, your CPU default is 2400 and your mobo only goes up to 2666, but using a 3000mhz kit?.... and you said you haven't OCd the system.

[Ózzy]

Originally posted by Damien:

You should stress test your system with something like Prime95. See if it really is stable. The game zombie physics make it CPU extensive where other titles like BF1 clearly are not, but GPU dependable titles with big in house AAA engines made sure they run on every platform running them console or pc.

Your PC also doesn't need to be overclocked for your problems to occur. Might simply be a undervoltage situation, many mobo combos can simply ♥♥♥♥ up proper voltages. So stress test that system, if it fails we know, if it runs a good loop several hours, we know more again. After that I would do DDU uninstall for the drivers and if that doesn't work simply just reset W10 and reinstall it from the MS cloud. Format C ! FTW !

EDIT: what speed is your memory setup, your CPU default is 2400 and your mobo only goes up to 2666, but using a 3000mhz kit?.... and you said you haven't OCd the system.

Gonna run a torture test with Prime95, i'll let ya know how it goes. As for the ram, yes, these specific sticks of ram can go up to 3000 mhz but since the motherboard/cpu doesn't support that, it auto-limits the memory to 2400 (1200 mhz, according to cpu-z), so evertying s h o u l d be fine on that front.

[Ózzy]

So, i left prime95 running for a few hours, nothing strange happened. Temperatures were as expected (max 70ºC, since it's summer here) minus the odd temp spike to 80ºC for less than half a second. Event viewer didn't reveal anything useful, only mentioned that an "unexpected shutdown" happened. Yeah, no ♥♥♥♥.

However, since doing these things, i've found other reports here on steam from people with similar problems to mine. Some of them recommended rolling back the save since it could've been corrupted. so i've done as such and since then i've had no more crashes. Apparently, this particular problem has existed for some time now and the "severity" of the crash varies from machine to machine, as well as its frequency. I've tried but couldn't figure out the reason, although others seem to just assume it's poor coding. Some people report crashes to desktop while others report blue screens, with rolling back the save and praying that it doesn't happen again being the only solution for a fix.

VERY weird, never imagined this gem of a game could be so finicky in regards to stability. And on a post-launch DLC with years of bug fixes, no less. Damn. Oh well, thanks for the help anyways, to all of you. Very appreciated!

PS: If anything new happens, i'll post it here.

[Damien]

Usually a corrupt save location causes error handling that just is supposed to crash the app itself not the system in it's entirety. This is what was so sus about your report and lead to believe in hardware mail functioning rather than a sophisticated software bug. Good to hear you can game again. o/