Update broke my game

[sploop]

After the recent 70+gb update, I loaded into my previously working game and noticed my character's appearance had become completely distorted. Skinny legs, massive cheeks and brows, head stuck out through hair etc.

Tried to create a new character and even with default settings, my character's features were distorted. particularly the face as above. Changing head settings didn't fix it.

decided to uninstall all mods and delete local player data, verify game files, reboot, and try again.

now the game crashes when loading the character creation screen.

e.g. create game > single player. The transition screen comes up, then screen goes black before i get to the character creation screen. Laptop fans start running like crazy and the UE shooter game has crashed message pops up. I can't open the error message or minimize the game at all. i.e. i have to open task manager with ctrl-alt-del because alt-tab, windows button or the windows taskbar does not work, then i have to press A and then del to kill the ark process without being able to see task manager because nothing will appear on top of the black game window.

I have a Lenovo LOQ laptop. The game ran fine for 11 hours last weekend.
i7-13620H
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU
Windows 11 (22H2)


<CrashType>GPUCrash</CrashType>
<ErrorMessage>LowLevelFatalError [File:C:\j\workspace\RelA\Engine\Source\Runtime\D3D12RHI\Private\D3D12Util.cpp] [Line: 873]
CurrentQueue.Fence.D3DFence-&gt;GetCompletedValue() failed
at C:\j\workspace\RelA\Engine\Source\Runtime\D3D12RHI\Private\D3D12Submission.cpp:939
with error DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED with Reason: DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG

[sploop]

Update:

Doing this has fixed the problem for me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ARK/comments/17plsn4/possible_fix_for_dxgi_error_device_removed_with/