Crash during Dettlaff fight

[KingAragorn]

Game keeps crashing during 3rd phase of Dettlaff fight, i don't use any mods, anyone have the same issue and know how to fix it?

[Pilgrum]

I'm having the same issue, haven't found a fix, not much info available online.
Just gonna sub in case someone knows a solution

[a bad driver]

Unfortunately, I don't know a solution here but I will make a suggestion because something buggy happened to me right around the same time. It was AFTER I defeated him and I thought my game froze. It was like the video playback got stuck when attempting to play out one of the cut scenes...but the audio continued. Since the audio continued, I had hope that my game was still running and possibly recoverable. I had difficulty defeating him and was not about to start over. If I recall correctly, I tried ALT+TAB'ing out and back into the game (probably many times) and tried to get to the graphics menu to make changes by mashing the ESC key if I'm not mistaken. Whatever I did or whatever fixed, my intent/hope was for the game to renegotiate the video signal assuming that it might be impacted by a refresh rate or resolution change. Whatever I did worked and I was able to continue my game a few moments later. Or maybe I just had to wait it out briefly before the issue corrected itself. I had never experienced anything like that at any other point during my playthrough. I'm running at 1440p and I have a 165Hz monitor. Good luck!

[JesterMess]

Same here. It's absolutely ridiculous that the game will crash with no error message present in the slightest. How can we possibly diagnose the issue if no error is presented? I've sent report after report to CDPR but why would they even continue to support this game after so many years? At this point my save file appears F*CKED and I don't know what to do to fix it. Even without mods, my game experience is now ruined.

I would try A Bad Driver's suggestion above, however the moment the issue appears I have about 3 seconds before the entire game crashes to desktop and pausing is impossible. It does seem like it's trying to load a cutscene but simply trips all over itself and fails.

If anyone has another suggestion, I'd humbly and truly appreciate it.

[djhoeft]

Add me to the list... during the 3rd phase of the final Detlaff boss fight, the game crashes to desktop. I have zero warning - game freezes and crashes. I've spent two months in the game and now, the entire experience is ruined. I've not had a single problem with the game until now.

[Pilgrum]

I seem to have actually found a solution, turning off ray tracing just for the fight allowed me to finish it no issue. If you weren't playing with ray tracing on, I'm not sure :/

[KingAragorn]

Originally posted by Pilgrum:

I seem to have actually found a solution, turning off ray tracing just for the fight allowed me to finish it no issue. If you weren't playing with ray tracing on, I'm not sure :/

This worked for me too, thank you sir....you saved over a hundred hours of gameplay :)

[Lugg]

thank you so much, i was just finishing my first playthrough and had no problems through the whole game, done the fight tens of times trying different options but it would always crash a minute into the third phase. Your solution fixed it and i finally was able to finish this glorious game!

[Shadow_Anna]

So for anyone checking this out in 2025, for me it crashed even after turning ray tracing and verifying my files. For me what solved it was turning on Directx11 instead of Directx12 this will disable ray tracing completely. You can turn it on later again. But for some reason it breaks this fight. Hope this helps