Just got the game, and so far it seems very fun, but have been experiencing frequent crashes. Have tried various suggestions online: Some of the things I tried in order:
1. Update latest video drives
2. Clean install of latest video drivers
3. Lowering video settings
4. Ensuring anistropic filtering is off (both in Nvidia control panel and in-game)
5. Ensure all background tasks are closed
6. Ensure optimizing shaders is allowed to complete
7. Hexedit .exe to change assertions in code to no-ops (reverted when it didn't help)

Despite everything, I can still normally just play for just 5-15 minutes before I get another crash to the desktop. The game is fun when I can play, but unplayable for me in the current form.

Any other suggestions? My computer is an older gaming laptop specs are:
Core i7-5700HQ
Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 3GB
16 GB DDR4
128 GB SSD
1 TB HDD
Windows 10

Thanks for anyone who can suggest other options.

Just as a quick update, for anyone else who has similar issues, updating settings to enable vsync and cap framerate to 60 seems to reduce the frequency of crashes quite a bit. Now seems to occur every 1 hour or so. Game is playable, but still feel stressed all the time to find another save point.

Just as a second update, the latest patch on 12/7/2020, seems to have made the issue MUCH better. I just played for around 3 hours without any crash. I eventually did get a crash, but it seems like they fixed many of whatever issue was impacting my machine in the latest patch.

Can now play for many hours, but notice that there are some areas that seem to be "problematic" for my system configuration. Seems that areas with combinations of both people and machines seem to cause the most problems (e.g. bandit camps). In those sort of areas I can crash 5,6,7 times trying to finish a battle before I can finish. Once everything is dead, the area no longer seems problematic. Make those fights especially difficult when I have to keep retrying them when it crashes in the middle of the fight! Otherwise though, game still seems to be behaving relatively well.

Using patch 1.09 for game
Nvidia driver 460.79