Game randomly goes black screen and crashes

:arrow_forward: GAME INFORMATION

  • GAME BUILD #: 101.101.56005.0 7694700
  • GAME PLATFORM: Steam
  • OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 11

:arrow_forward: ISSUE EXPERIENCED

In the middle of a match, the game will randomly go black screen for a brief moment, bug out the entire game and and my desktop, and then probably crash. If it does not crash, the game will continue without most particle effects (like the sparkling lights in the main menu or the tracer effect for mangonel shots). However, if it happens for a second time, the game will crash.

:arrow_forward: FREQUENCY OF ISSUE

  • 50% of the time / matches I play (FREQUENTLY)

:arrow_forward: REPRODUCTION STEPS

I cannot reproduce it as it is seemly completely random. It can happen 10 minutes into the game, or just does not happen at all even if I play for 2 hours straight. Like, I was recording just hopefully thinking I can get the video clips showing how it crashes, and the game just ran smoothly without any issue for 3 hours. But what I can assure is, I never saw this issue in the previous version. If it was my GPU’s fault, it should have been crashing all the time even before this version, but no, the game was good and the only crashes were game bugs too, and there are no issues when I run something more GPU-consuming either. GPU driver is up to date (NVIDIA 511.23).

Hi Serene0509!

I recommend you to try some stuff:

  1. Deleting your user files. For deleting your user files, you should:

a. Make sure that your Steam Cloud is disabled in Steam, AoE2 game, Properties, General.
b. Go to C:\Users\YOUR_USER\Games\Age of Empires 2 DE.
c. Copy your user folder to a safe place, it has lots of numbers.
d. Delete the original folder
e. Verify your files in Steam, AoE2 game, Properties, Local Files.
f. Open the game again. A new user folder will be created.

If this works, then copy back the files from your old user folder. Those files are in the folder -C:\Users\YOUR_USER\Games\Age of Empires 2 DE<0>\Savegame, Recorded Games and Save games.

If this does not work you can also try:

  1. Reinstall the game
  2. Unable your mods
  3. Uninstall Citrix, Mcafee, Malwarebytes, Bitdefender, Avast or AVG programs if you have them, these programs could make your pc slower.
  4. Reinstall your graphic drivers, update Windows
  5. Update direct X
  6. Make sure that your game is not running on the integrated GPU
  7. Restart your PC and close as many background programs as you can before starting the game.
  8. Disable Enhanced Graphics if your hardware is not very fast
  9. Installing latest VC++ redistributables from here (both x86 and x64 variants): Latest supported Visual C++ Redistributable downloads | Microsoft Docs
  10. Reinstall Steam

If this does not fixes the problem could you add here a video or your logs of the day where this happens? Logs could be found here: “C:\Users\USER\Games\Age of Empires 2 DE\logs” and have this format “2022.01.20-18.28.40” and mdmp like: “AoE2DESteam-58115-2022.01.19-15.05.33.mdmp”

I did disable mod when I first encountered this problem, and it did disappear for a couple of games. But it would still happen, though much less frequently than having mods enabled. I also reinstalled the driver a few times, it doesn’t seem to solve the problem. I‘ve uploaded the log file and the dump file. I’ll try out the other listed methods, thanks for the reply.

1 Like

I see

Thanks for this, we are already tracking this issue :sparkles:

You could honestly just create a new topic with common bug fixes for people to try, because I feel like I’ve seen you say this a lot, or at least it seems to be a common dev solution. Just find a few more other things that commonly seem to solve problems, and then either add it to the “How to report a bug topic”, with examples of the kinds of problems it can solve, or create a new topic and pin it. I don’t really expect you to implement this, but it could be a time saver if it helps some people with their problems, without needing to create a post.

1 Like