Same issue. Black screen for a second, then to the desktop with the game still running in the background. No error, nothing and the game still responds to my inputs when I tab back to the window, but it stays on the desktop. The game seems to minimize to the top left corner of the screen, well that's where the mouse pointer ends up and there's a small rectangular field or artifact of whatever is happening with the game.

Running on Windows 7. With a Gigabyte 970. i7-2600k. 16 GB ram. With dual monitors. With Real Temp GT and the Gigabyte OC Guru II running in the second window (nothing is off when the game flips to the desktop).

I've done a fresh reinstall of the Nvidia driver. I guess I should try running the game without Galaxy up, each time I've been launching it from there and that as a whole feels buggy as hell.

Update: The 1.04 patch seems to have cleared this up for me. Haven't had the problem since it updated. Keeping my hopes up.

I'm not sure what they changed / patched, but I haven't crashed even once since the latest patch. Makes it much nicer to play. Between that and giving us the option to "Unlock Keybinds" so we can do all our own, I'm very happy to see that they're actually listening to us!! :)

Well sadly the problem doesn't seem to be completely fixed. Just had it happen again, though it's the first time since the 1.04 patch.

Guys, I had exactly the same issue, crash to desktop with no error, it suddenly started just after 2-3 days of playing and I'm on i7 4790k + GTX 980.

It does NOT happen to me any more after doing this:

- CHANGE DISPLAY MODE TO BORDERLESS / FULLSCREEN (TRY BOTH)
- UNPLUG SECONDARY MONITOR (IF USING MULTIPLE DIFFERENT MONITORS)
- DISABLE GEFORCE EXPERIENCE
If you use GeForce Experience, please make sure that you disable Shadowplay before launching the game. If disabling Shadowplay wasn't helpful, please disable GeForce Experience altogether, and make sure that you reset graphics device settings after that. To do this:
1) right-click on your desktop and select Nvidia Control Panel,
2) click Manage 3D Settings,
3) in the upper-right corner, click Restore Defaults.
To disable GeForce Experience, find its icon in your system tray (lower-right corner), right-click it and select "Exit".

that could be it! I also have 2 monitors, so gonna give it a test

I'm getting this crash again since patch 1.05! Was running great and got well over 30+hrs without any problems after the initial ones. Now it is crashing to desktop regularly... Sometimes with the music still playing, but not always!

I saw the "Disable Geforce Experience" on the offical W3 forums and it worked for me.I can play consantly now without any CTD or freezes.

My crashes stop completely once I uninstalled a program called Kairos Display. Before this the game crashes instantly without warning when actual gameplay starts.

Still getting the random quit to desktop issue. I am now running a clean install of Win 10 and the newest driver from nvidia....still happening. It's random and sometimes I can play for hrs without an issue....I don't get it.

I tried many things, restoring drivers, playing on windowed mode, disabling antivirus, playing without OC, etc.
Unless you are having issues with other games, I think you are having the same issue as I did, if you are playing with a controller instead of a keyboard, your PC will not detect any actions from your controller therefore it will depending on your configuration, it will turn off your screen or even your hard drive, causing your game to minimize or in some cases, I guess even going to sleep or turning off your hard drive, that´s why I suspect for some it completely crashes the while for others like me, it only minimized it.

After not even wanting to play the game because of this, I can't believe the issue was so simple, but coming from an IT area, I´m not that surprised, I´d bet my house that most of the cases are like mine judging from the symptoms.

So to fix this just to power options, select maximum performance if you haven´t already and set it to never turn off your screen, the same with hard disk.

And this started for me after moving from a 780 to a 970, also, it coincides with a patch, not sure what number, I stopped playing for over a month.

This fix worked for me as well when I was having the same crashing problems last weekend.

this fixed my problem also thank you so very much.......you rock

Hey guys,

I´m new to this forum but I need help. I started playing in May and played the whole game through without experiencing any crashes at all. And that with very old hardware even beyond the minimum specs. Now a week ago I finally set up my new system and wanted to start with the add-on. Right now I have the game crashing to desktop at all random situations (finishing quests, accessing the inventory, saving etc). Lowering the graphic settings, switching fullscreen/borderless and updating the gpu drivers all didn´t work. I tried to roll back on patch 1.10 but it won´t even launch like this (even if the process is visible in the task manager). Maybe you´ve got an idea what I can try.

Here my specs:
OS Win 7 SP 1
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.4GHz
8192MB RAM
AMD Radeon 9290

Thanks in advance!

Big Red Label

Tentatively reporting that this seems to have worked for me too. The game initially ran without any issues but around 15 hours in mark I started getting CTDs that seemingly happened at random. Since disabling the game overlay, I've put in nearly 8 hours crash free.