Have just managed to play 5 hours of Phoenix Point, and I’ve run into a few issues.
The most major issue is that it has completely crashed my computer 3 times. No error messages, nothing in the log files, the computer just shuts down. The only way I can power the computer back on is by removing the power cable and plugging it back in. All 3 times, this has happened on the geoscape. The first two times I was at an exploration point and was in the screen that describes what you found. The most recent time was on the geoscape screen directly preceding a mission. My drivers are up to date. I’m running a Nvidia Geforce GTX 980, 16GB RAM, and a AMD FX-8370 4Ghz 8-core, so my system shouldn’t even blink at the game.
I have had scrapes with sections on alien lair missions being completely dark. I also had a random incident where my technician’s heavy weapons and ammo were randomly replaced with sniper equipment… I no longer had any technician equipment anywhere in my inventory at that point. Fortunately, this immediately preceded one of my system crashes, and the last save file was before my equipment got “swapped out”.
The game play issues are annoying, but I would really need for the crashing issue to be resolved. If I’m having to pull the plug on my computer just so I can bring it back up every hour or two, that makes the game entirely unplayable. If there are any game-related log files I could send in, I’d gladly pull them and send them in.
i’ll be honest, i’ve started seeing this. once it killed the computer dead, now I can generally manage to recover it in windows. always seems to be either on the geoscape or mission complete and about to load the geoscape…
frustrating… and very soon will stop me playing at all.
That sounds really weird! And doesn’t seem like it could be blamed on the game. The suspicious things are the replacing of assets, the unlit areas of the level geometry and the hard crashes without error logs.
Those sound like symptoms of RAM or the GPU dying.
The really weird thing is the fact you have to remove the power supply to the motherboard. Because, IMO, that indicates an overheating problem where some sort of safety switch is triggered to stop the instant restarting of the PC. That could also potentially explain the other above issues if the GPU/RAM were getting too hot, too. (The other possibility of the power switch issue could be an electrical short but it seems unlikely for any sort of long-running build)
Have you checked that all your fans are running? (CPU/GPU)
My two suggestions would be:
If you have a spare or alternative GPU you can remove from another PC, try with that and see if you get the same problem.
Take out and re-seat the RAM and GPU (assuming you feel comfortable doing that)
The last resort is, if you have more than one RAM sticks then try running with only one or two and then swapping them out. E.g. if you have 2x8GB sticks run with one, see if there’s crashing behaviour and then run with the other.
I’ll try reseating stuff when I get home tonight. That being said, I am left with the question of why is this only happening with Phoenix Point? I played and have been recently playing games that should be far more taxing on my system that PP should be. And further, why is this only happening in the geoscape? Most of your game time is spent in actual missions, and after having now crashed 4 times in 7 hours, you’d think that these crashes would happen at least once during the part of the game that is most taxing. But every time, it has been on the geoscape with an exploration site pulled up on the screen (the screen either telling you, “Here’s the random loot/person you found!” or, “Here’s a mission to go do!”).
Yeah, it’s really weird behaviour. I can’t explain why it’s happening only in this game. It’s possible it is the game but it just seems very random… cause I would expect a really bad issue like this to be being experienced by many more users (like the black screens on loading the game).
While I appreciate the point, I have been seeing this too. my GPU is 2 weeks old and I am a heavy regular gamer and do not see this issue with anything else apart from Phoenix Point and only with that particular save game.
So, have to disagree with that one personally… lets see if the patch has helped at all…
Reseated everything tonight with no luck. I also had a monitoring tool running, and system temps and resource utilization were all within acceptable ranges the entire time. I did pull a Unity log file that I saw referenced in another thread immediately after a crash, so the last thing in that log should be the last thing that happened in-game prior to the crash. If needed, I can send that in somehow.
And to add some additional clarifications to my issues… when I mean that my computer shuts down, I mean just that… one second, you’re cruising along just fine, then everything is dark the next second. No BSOD, no indicators that something happened, the computer is just suddenly off. I thus far have not been able to consistently replicate it. Tonight’s crash still happened on the geoscape with an exploration point screen pulled up. However, I can pull up the save files from prior to the crash and continue playing without immediately triggering the crash again.
In one of the other threads with similar issues, it was mentioned that overclocks (even factory) on the graphics card can cause this type of crashing. I was actually surprised to find that there are many games which exhibit this behaviour.
So I guess the next question to ask is if your graphics card is overclocked either by yourself or from the third part supplier (MSI, etc). If it is, can you try and returning the clocks to the standard settings?
I posted in another thread about this as I’m experiencing the same thing (except my crashes have become very frequent, and only appeared after ~9 hours of game play.) I do have an overclocked 1080ti, but I have not had this issue at any point during in the last two years for ANY application. I don’t think it’s the video card that needs an adjustment here.
I’ve been relegated to a small laptop with integrated graphics that can barely run the game now. Thankfully you can transfer saves.
If that’s what you believe, Cjlewis3, sure. But when someone else brought this up, I went searching through google and found many instances, including for games like The Witcher 3, where this was discovered.
I might be reading this wrong but…But it sounds like you just confirmed it is a Hardware issue - cause you are playing it on another laptop.
I brought this up in another post - I had crashes/freezes/complete shutdown and all - I solved this issue by removing my OC on my GPU. If you have a GPU that is factory OC then you need to underclock it - probably around 5%-10% - until the game is stable - then save the GPU profile in MSI Afterburner (or whatever you want to use) and then you can switch back and forth when playing/not playing PP.
Well yes, in all likelihood it IS due to the hardware, my point was that the hardware is doing what it’s supposed to. After years of stable operation it’s not a coincidence that this one application is the ONLY one to cause issues. That means there is a core software issue behind it, and the hardware isn’t what should be getting fixed.
What is most perplexing is that the freezes didn’t start until almost 9 hours in. I’m going to try moving my saves from the laptop (which had 20+ hours added) and see if the behavior stays the same.
I have not overclocked my system. While I don’t see any indication the GPU is overclocked out of the box, it is running with GPU Boost 2.0. I am certainly willing to try making tweaks to the system to see if it’ll make a difference, but this overclocking/underclocking stuff is so far outside my wheelhouse, I don’t have the foggiest idea of how to approach it.
I’ve been playing this game on and off since release for the same reason. My desktop experiences a complete crash and I have to unplug from the wall on most occasions. Seems to me it’s tripping some type on electronic circuit breaker/fuse. I’ve checked for loose wires and poor seating already. Like others reporting, this has only been an issue with phoenix point. Since release I’ve probably played 40-50 other games with no issue. I’m currently running the game on a NVidia 2060. Drivers are up to date. My crashes seem to be specific to missions. Replaying them repeatedly until I get lucky and can complete them allows me to continue the campaign for some time until I hit another mission with the same issue. Doesn’t seem to be tied to a particular map. I currently have a save file that’s at a mission that has crashed repeatedly if there is a staff member I can share with.
I’ve recently started to monitor my system while playing PP. It’s not a CPU hog, but at times it appears to grab twice the amount of memory it usually uses. I haven’t had the system shutdown issues (except once, when it locked the system - holding the power button until the system shutdown & restarted was the solution). I think it recently caused Windows Explorer to crash, but the system restarted it successfully.
If you need to unplug from the wall, this means that you motherboard detects some problem. Maybe overheating, maybe some power spike. Lower game details and turn off overclocking like suggested above. It may be just Phoenix Point related (and probably to some other games that you don’t possess), but you won’t skip this issue.