Darktide has been crashing for me since I purchased it last month. After launching the game there would be a long load time (over a minute) before the launcher appeared. After clicking “Play” the shader cache would compile and then nothing would happen for 2-3 minutes, after which I would receive a crash report.
I was able to launch the game somewhat consistently by reinstalling my graphics drivers (Nvidia) before launching the game, after which the game would run almost perfectly. However, I would need to repeat this every time I launched the game. Since Hotfix 1.2.22 this has stopped working and I cannot launch the game no matter what I try.
I have followed all of the advice I can find on the forum including: deleting my AppData Darktide folder, disabling any overlays, including exceptions in my firewall, and reinstalling redistributables; as well as a bunch of other stuff, some of which made me feel like an 80s hacker, so that was cool at least.
Sorry for the long post, any advice or help would be appreciated.
[PC] Do You Use Mods? (Optional):
No, I don’t use mods
Reproduction Rate (Required):
Constant (100%)
Platform (Required):
Steam (PC)
[PC] Crash Report (Optional):
GUID: 54ddc307-ca20-4730-a208-35691f2fb2ec
Log File:
Info Type:
Unfortunately it’s not clear what could be causing this, it’s suspected this is a driver or Windows kernel issue. Have you ever had any trouble with your Windows installation?
I haven’t, no. All the other games I’ve played have run just fine.
The only one I’ve had issues with has been Vermintide 2 interestingly enough. I have a similar problem with it, in that it takes a minute to load the launcher and then a few minutes to launch the game from there, much longer than my friends have to wait when we play together. The difference being that Vermintide launches consistently without crashing.
I have wondered if Darktide shares the same issue, but detects the minutes of inactivity as a crash and shuts itself down, as opposed to Vermintide just continuing and eventually launching.
I have no idea if that’s how these things work though.
ive been working on improving the deadlock reporting when it happens early.
My suspicion is that it’s an issue with game overlay in steam. Try disable it from steam menu and see if that helps. If this is an issue, this is nothing we can fix since it’s on valve.
Nvidia couldn’t see any reason why it get stuck either. You could see if removing the check makes the game continue instead of crashing. In this case you timeout due to the engine being stuck here for 2 min.
in game files, lookup this file win32_settings.ini and change value of deadlock_detector_enabled to false
I was able to launch the game somewhat consistently by reinstalling my graphics drivers (Nvidia) before launching the game, after which the game would run almost perfectly. However, I would need to repeat this every time I launched the game
This also doesn’t sound great. Are you playing other games and in this case perhaps games using DLSS? Feels like this can potentially be an issue with your windows installation or something that makes the drivers not working as they should. Not sure if windows have a repair mode, but might be worth testing that.
After disabling the deadlock detector in settings I was able to launch the game and load into the hub area. I haven’t tested out a match yet, but in the past I have had no issues once I actually got into the game, so this looks very promising.
As to other games, I have been playing quite a few with no issues: Starfield, a number of Total War titles, and Owlcat’s Pathfinder games. I did run a System File Checker Scan which did report fixing a few issues a while ago, before I made the original post, but that didn’t seem to solve anything with Darktide.
At the risk of celebrating prematurely though, I’m more than happy to suffer through long start-up times if I can actually play the game. Thank you very much for your help with this, both @Axloss and @FatsharkJulia.
edit: For your information, it takes approximately 140 seconds to get from launcher to splash screens with the deadlock detector disabled.