Game crashes in Breakdown

[John Hadley]

I'm playing Breakdown and I've noticed that the game crashes sometimes at the moment that I walk out the gate of the Alamo into its parking lot. In particular this seems to happen frequently (maybe every game?) very shortly after I choose it as my home base at the start of the game, like on my first or second mission.

The crash occurs at the moment that the game would auto-save I think. When I reload the game and walk out the gate again it does not crash and I'm able to play sometimes for several hours before I get a crash again.

This is very annoying and I never remember having any issue like this with State of Decay when I played it on this same system but it has since received a few minor upgrades like a faster cpu (from 2.2 GHz to 3.0 Ghz) and upgrade of the operating system from Windows 8 32-bit (or maybe even Windows XP. I don't remember how long ago I played it.) to Windows 8.1 64-bit. I've checked the integrity of the Steam files, made sure I'm using the latest WHQL drivers Nvidia has available, and reinstalled the 2010 vcredist which was already installed.

Has anyone else experienced this bug? Are there any known fixes or workarounds?

My system specs are:
Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit
Intel E8400 Core 2 Duo 3 Ghz dual core processor
6 GB DDR2 system ram
Intel DG33FB motherboard
PNY GeForce GT 240 w/ 512 MB DDR5 video ram
2 TB hard drive - standard, not solid state or anything exotic

[EolSunder]

never experienced it because i never used the worst base in the game the Alamo lol. I'm guessing simply because its located smack dab in one of the graphically challenged places in the whole game, Marshall, that your experiencing some type of lag crash. Either that or your system is laughing at you because you chose the Alamo as a base and its just crashing as protest to being stuffed into a little base box.

[John Hadley]

Since my video card is a few years old and doesn't need any of the DX11 or SLI stuff that is being tweaked in the new drivers anyway I decided to try installing the oldest WHQL driver still offered at nvidia.com for Windows 8.1, version 327.23 from 9/19/2013. I haven't had any crashes yet in the first few hours at the Alamo. Keeping my fingers crossed. I'll need more testing time to know for sure if this has solved the problem, but so far so good. I was having crash issues in both 340.52 and 341.44. Yesterday I crashed the game about 5 times in 3 hours at the Alamo, but I played the next round at the Church base and it didn't crash at all there in the whole round.

[John Hadley]

Just got another crash coming out the gate into the parking lot of the Alamo. Looks like changing the driver did not solve anything,

I am almost certain that this is a crash related to the autosave. It has occurred at least ten times coming out of the gate of the Alamo. It happened once after I finished a survey mission at the watch tower above the Alamo. It happened once at some other location in Marshall that I don't remember where exacly. I did not have a mission because the RV was ready to go and I was just doing some last minute scavenging. I think I was just driving down the street. It also happened one time when I left the church base, but I think I went over the wall and not out the gate which I usually use.

I don't ever remember crashing a single time while I was in the middle of a mission, in Marshall or anywhere else. I tend to start a mission to get a character to join me then run all around the town cleaning up any infestations, getting loot from houses, making outposts etc. as long as I can before completing the mission, so there's definitely been plenty of opportunity to crash.

[John Hadley]

Its closing the gate at the Alamo. For whatever reason that causes me to crash a lot. If I walk through the gate and dont close it then its ok, but if I close the gate behind me it crashes. I played two full rounds at the church base with no crashes. I go to the Alamo, walk through the gate, close it, crash. I crashed it at least 3 times yesterday by closing the gate also.

This is sad for me as the Alamo is my favorite base so far for early levels of breakdown.
- Its centrally located in Marshall where so there are lots of nearby mission and looting sites
- It comes with storage so I can fill it up with food early and probably never need to forage for food again before I'm done with the level.
- It only gets 4 outposts, but all the outpost sites nearby easily cover the street and parking lot to kill oncoming hordes.
- You can move in with only 20 materials and any number of survivors, so if someone died its still fine.

Yeah it doesn't have lots of outposts or lots of building sites, but I never need anything more than a medic, workshop, beds, and shooting platform to finish a level anyway. By the time I build anything more advanced its already time to finish the level.

I can see that for a campaign game where you plan to stay a long time or for a breakdown run where you are trying to max the score and not just finish the level to get to the next one the Alamo is a subpar site, but it works just fine so far for me in Breakdown. I find it way better than the church site which constantly sends me remote missions that have no direct road routes. I have to either go off-road and possibly damage my car in the process or I have to spend a lot of time out and around to get to my destination.

I haven't used the trucking site much but I remember it would send me on missions to the area across the bridge towards the fairgrounds sometimes. The alamo is far enough south that doesn't usually happen unless you go up there and reveal an enclave.

[John Hadley]

I read a message that another user wrote about the limitations of the engine where he was talking about a mod that gives difficulty increases all the way up to level 99 of Breakdown and he said that the game crashes if you aggro more than 30 monsters at once, so maybe this is what is happening to me at the Alamo. The gate makes noise when you close it so perhaps it creates or aggros existing monsters in all the lots around it. No other base has lots packed in so close all around it. I have crashed the game a few times by jumping through the window of the base too now, another thing that makes noise. All crashes I can remember came right after making some kind of noise in heavily populated area now that I think of it.