Game crashes computer when I start it - shadows and water reflections

Nyalani · May 2017

Hi,

My boyfriend installed this game a few days for the early access, and hasn't been able to play until, hopefully, now.

Every time he starts the game, it crashes, but not only that, his computer freezes and doesn't respond to mouse/keyboard at all.

After playing around with all kinds of things, from drivers, windows updates, to in-game things like resolution (he has a 4k screen), eventually we set all graphics settings to minimal and started boosting them one by one.

Finally, now, we found that with all graphics settings to high/ultra/max (whichever is highest), EXCEPT shadows and water reflections, both of which have to be entirely OFF, the game actually starts and he can get through to the character creation.

I've seen several posts where people have problems with this game crashing after login on these forums, but since I haven't found a lot that mention the computer freezing alltogeter, I decided to make a new thread. But perhaps this will work for someone else too?

Also, both shadows and water reflections, even if just any ONE of them is set to LOW, makes the game, and computer, crash, what gives? His recommended settings according to Nvidia would be every single setting to max.

(his computer is an asus maximus formula VII motherboard, I7 core, GEForce GTX 780 graphics card build with 16 gb corsair dominator ram built a couple of years ago)

My laptop, which has the 770M graphics card, has no issues with the game crashing at high settings, and this has been confusing us for days.

Nyalani · June 2017

Update: After the hotfix, the game crashes the computer even with minimum settings, rendering the game unplayable.

I have, however, noticed that a lot of the people who talk about the game being inclined to crash on here and other ESO related social media seem to be people who just installed/re-installed the whole client instead of updating their existing client to Morrowind?

I know that in our case, I had ESO installed already and it updated to Morrowind in the patcher on the day it released to early access.

My boyfriend however, installed the whole client the day Morrowind had released...

I am really at a loss for what to try next though, even minimum settings don't work anymore and NOTHING has changed on the computer when it stopped working from one day to the next. NO new drivers, NO new hardware, NOTHING was installed or updated except ESO's hotfix.

Edit: Wanted to point out that when I say NOTHING got updated other than ESO, that also includes WIndows updates, which are usually automatic. He runs Windows 10 Pro.