Dragon Age Origins freezing in Kocari Wilds at exact same spot each time

I recently bought the ultimate edition of Dragon Age Origins on Steam and I've have no issues up to this point. There is one spot in the Kocari Wilds which is related to the side quest "The Missionary" where there is a chest between two statues right after killing the alpha wolf. As soon as I start moving towards the chest, the game freezes and I'm forced to restart every single time. I've tried and retried about two dozens times now to no avail.

My PC specs:

CPU: i5-4690k (at base clock speed)

Memory: 8 gb RAM

Graphics Card: MSI GTX 970

OS: Windows 8.1 64-bit

DirectX 11

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z97-HD3

Game is installed on a HDD while operating system is on a SSD

I am using a few mods but the mods only make changes to the player character model. I don't have any mods that alter the game world. Still, I've tried deactivating all mods and it hasn't made any difference.

I've also tried the following and none of them have worked:

- Set affinity of DAOrigins.exe to only use 1 or 2 cores instead of the default 4 cores.

- Run the game in Windows 7 compatibility mods and as adminstrator.

- Lower graphics to the absolute minimum settings, disable/enable vsync.

- reload to an earlier save prior to entering the Kocari Wilds