Hey guys,

when I press the "Play" button, the mouse cursor indicates the system is loading. Any other game would then open full screen and run, but Outcast opens a black screen, then my PC hard crashes. This is reproducable.
The event log doesn't say anything but "unexpected system shutdown".

My specs:
6900 XT
5800X
32 GB RAM
Win 10 64bit

Nothing overclocked or fiddled with. Any other game runs fine.

Halp D:

You can try game support. The probem is however that the game is hitting a OS, driver, BIOS, or other hardware issue. That's the only reason why your PC crash and burns. Games only use hardware through softwrare and that hardware's software and the hardware itself will mean how stable your PC is or isn't.

But, you don't have to believe me. I can't solve this for you though. It can be highly technical (and I'm not getting into it further than this).

I know you might think that other games are fine and its not your PC and I wish that could be true but it isn't. Every game uses hardware differently.

If anything, this game uses up to 100% CPU when not using DLSS (DLSS heavily drops the CPU use here) and you might be running into an overheating CPU. But, its just a wild guess and that is like swiss cheese trying to navigate by guessing. That would be good to rule out. There's all kinds of things past that.

Thanks for replying.
I have been running this setup for two years. Never had a problem and don't know why there would be one all of a sudden.
I'll open a bug report.

Hm... this more than meets the game's requirements, so I' a bit stumped as to what's happening here. I'd suggest reporting it via the community bug database, with your dxdiag and crash logs attached, so the devs/QA can investigate.

How to get dxdiag:
press Windows key + R key and and type "dxdiag", then press OK. --- Once the dxdiag is done, press "Save all information" and save it somewhere easily accessible

How to get crash logs:
press Windows key + R key and paste %localappdata%/O2/Saved

Game version should be 1.0.3.1.293481

Sadly, GOG won't let me paste the database link directly. It should be as follows (replace spaces with full stops):

bugreporting thqnordic com/#/projects/139/outcast-a-new-beginning-community/add-issue

I did. Yesterday, I created a bug in the THQ Nordic bug tracking system (with dxdiag).
Crash logs are non existent. Neither event viewer, nor WhoCrashed offers proper information (WhoCrashed says that for the last crash no dump was created and event viewer just gives the usual "unexpected shutdown" message, as if it were a power outtage).
I am playing Cyberpunk, heavily modded Skyrim, heavily modded Fallout 4, RDR2, etc. without problems (I guess those would strain the system way more during gameplay than Outcast during game launch? - if it were a PSU or hardware fault).

My game version is 1.0.1, though (when I click on the settings button next to the "Play" button it says "Show Patch Notes (1.0.1)" (freely translated from german)). And no updates are being found when I click "search for updates" (again, freely translated from german).

Oh, to add, I wanted to point out that the game starts with shader compilation(PSO cache) and that hits the CPU at 100%. In the event, someone is thinking the game wasn't being played and so it couldn't be a CPU related issue. I even thought it couldn't be after I wrote it could be but had seen the usage during the compilation screen previously. And before that, the GPU driver, CPU voltage will change, and other things will need to be doing stuff for it to start.

But, not looking into it further. As we diverge on reasons and the two directions are not compatible.

Thanks for your input, echoVolume.
Just to rule it out, I underclocked the CPU (from 4,8Ghz to 3,8Ghz) and during stress testing it reached a max of 78°C.
Yet, when starting Outcast, the PC shuts down.

same thing happens to me but when i play the game during unexpected time it restarts my computer
i have win11 , mobo b450 , gpu rx6600 , cpu ryzen 7 3800x, ram 32gb

Still the same for me after the latest patch.
I press "Play", the cursor turns into the little loading circle, the screen goes black (= game starting), the system shuts down.

Don't expect a game update to fix that.

When a game has a major problem, it will CTD (crash to desktop). In software, the code has what's called a hard crash which is a problem it can't deal with. In this, the OS deals with it, so a CTD happens. The other crashes of a game would be soft crashes and these the game can handle directly.

At worse a game can use hardware, drivers, OS, and various pieces of software. It does not at all ever determine a reboot or shutdown. Software can have memory leaks though (and if RAM runs out that way then OS's tend to have problems working( so you can open eg Windows Task Manager and set to always on top and watch RAM usage, etc and see what its like as a problem happens. But, I'm sure a memory leak of that type is not happening here.

The OS can cause BSOD's, reboots, etc. The hardware drivers can cause BSOD's, reboots, etc. The motherboard, PSU, etc can cause BSOD's, reboots, shutdowns. If eg RAM has a problem then the computer is going to go down.

Hardware can have various problems like what's going through a bunch of Intel hardware right now ( https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/intel-reportedly-blames-motherboard-makers-for-core-i9-cpu-crashes/ ) where Intel is blaming the motherboard manufacturers for bad BIOS/UEFI settings. AMD motherboards can also have bad settings or bugs that cause instability. These problems may not show up in anything else you use. As such people with those Intel boards were always blaming UE games and not their hardware. UE games just happened to point out that their hardware had a problem.

It is possible for the game to put out an update to use the drivers and hardware differently to the point it avoids the problem. But, its not to be expected. If you go based on that then its entirely likely you won't see any fix.

I can't diagnose or fix your hardware from the internet so all I can do is point this out. You could try running PRIME 95 which will hit your CPU 100% and use RAM. Try that for up to 10 minutes. https://www.mersenne.org/download/ That will make sure your CPU can run at 100% as this game is going to hammer it just the same right off the bat at opening for PSO shader cache build.

If that's fine, then diagnosing gets into a lot of other things, so I'm not going to specify anything further.

I hope you get it resolved at some point :)

at least they can fix the game from restarting like hundreds of games i have played.

update
weird... but i just put in a new rtx 3060 12gb .. and the game runs without problems

is it possible for a game to buy new gpu.. shame....

finally i bought new gpu rtx 3060 12gb and the game runs without problems no restart no crashes