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CorlainValez's avatar
CorlainValez
New Adventurer
2 months ago

"Load Error" Is Not A Bug, The Game Is Actually Working As Intended

One thing I noticed is that HDD (and external/low speed/older SSD I would imagine) is only supported on the Minimum specifications listed for Veilguard by EA:

Dragon Age™: The Veilguard - PC System Requirements (ea.com)

If you are using an HDD (or potentially an external/low speed/old SSD) it is only supported using the "Low" graphics preset only, any other graphics preset or higher level graphics support shows an SSD is required. So, regardless of the rest of your specs, if you are using an HDD (or potentially an external/low speed/old SSD) you should only attempt to play the game on the "Low" graphics preset. If you want to play the game on a higher graphics preset it is required that you have it installed on an internal SSD.

So, while EA did make it clear that unless you want to play the game on the "Low" graphics preset you can't use an HDD, they really should have made it much, much more clear in their requirements, especially on Steam where they did not post this graphic.

Given this I wouldn't expect this issue to ever get fixed, because it isn't a bug. If you are running the game off of an HDD (or potentially an external/low speed/old SSD) unless you want to play the game on the "Low" graphics preset it will likely never work correctly on any other graphics settings and this is something that can't be changed since it is fundamental to how the game loads assets into memory.

  • I forgot to mention, for anyone that is getting this error and has the game as well as their save game files on their primary internal SSD, the issue is that your in-game graphics settings are exceeding the ability of your SSD to keep up. The only thing you can do is decrease the graphics settings you are using until the error no longer occurs. I'd suggest going down one preset graphics settings step at a time until the error no longer occurs. Once you reach the point that the error no longer occurs that is the preset graphics setting that your system's SSD can handle. If you have already reached the "Low" preset graphics settings and the error is still occurring the only thing you can do at that point is lower the resolution that you are running the game at, and/or lowering and capping the frames per second (FPS) that you are running the game at. This will also help to reduce the amount of data that your SSD has to stream at any given moment to your GPU. You can also try lowering the resolution and FPS instead of reducing the graphics preset that you are using for the game as far as you need to in order to stop this error from occurring if you want to try and find the optimal possible combination of graphics fidelity, resolution, and FPS that your system can handle for the best gaming experience. However, lowering the resolution and/or FPS by themselves may not be enough to prevent this error from occuring so please keep in mind that you will likely also have to lower the graphics preset you have selected in order for this error to no longer appear.

    • aGhostlight's avatar
      aGhostlight
      Newcomer

      Yeah, anyway, my game installed on a brand new SSD bought in September, running with a brand new 4070 Ti SUPER. I set the graphics all the way to "Low", etc etc, and the error still occurs.

      So is there an actual solution, or am I just going to have to replay hours and hours? Because this error doesn't occur when I load a save from the Lighthouse, so it clearly has NOTHING to do with hardware settings or resolutions or where what is installed. It has to do with the maps it's loaded on, auto saves not working, and oh, it loads me in falling through maps when I do get into an auto save. So? Any actual solutions?

      • CorlainValez's avatar
        CorlainValez
        New Adventurer

        It was my best attempt to help people based on symptoms and presentation. It's unfortunate it was of no help to you. Obviously, the root of the problem is elsewhere in some cases.

        Based on what you are saying it appears to be an error with map loading information, especially the "falling" symptom you are experiencing speaks very strongly to a fundamental asset that failed to load. However, in the "falling" instance, you should have just gotten a Load Error since the game should never attempt to start a gaming session with fundamental map data missing. This speaks to a very serious error occurring in such a way that the integrity checking is failing to even recognize there is a serious problem.

        The why, however, is apparently something rather obscure or non-obvious since people have purged everything, re-installed, etc... with no success, so it doesn't seem to be a corruption of any kind. The failure to load due to a lack of speed leading to a timeout in the streaming resource loading system seems to be a source of the problem for many people as switching to internal SSD from external HDD helped many. However, External vs. Internal isn't the fundamental issue because I was playing the game installed to a quite generic external USB 3.2 NVMe enclosure housing a very mediocre NVMe drive connected to a Thunderbolt 4 port and I never ran into a single problem. If External vs. Internal was a major part of it my setup never should have worked. Also as your situation proves, it is not as simple as HDD vs. SSD for everyone either.

        At this point, to me, it seems to actually be a fundamental flaw or critical bug in the resource streaming system that the game uses to load maps and other similar data into the GPU. Something is occurring that is causing the resource streaming to either corrupt the data in transit to the GPU or it is failing to read the data into the GPU correctly despite having intact resources to work from. Unfortunately, that means that short of a full understanding of where/how/why this bug is occurring, reproduction on the part of the team that needs to write the patch, and a patch for this issue from them, this problem will likely not be solved any time soon.

        I wish I had better information for you.

  • Replying here since the previous subject seems to have been purged...

    I've had this issue for weeks now, and today's patch was supposed to have fixed it (at least, there's a note saying they fixed an issue with save loading on PCs). My game is installed on my HDD (no space on SSD), and I'm running all the settings on low, as required by the chart shared above. Crash happened 3 and half hours in, at D'meta's Corssing iirc, and it seems that most people having a problem with this do so in Arlathan forest, so I'm wondering if the problematic asset is in his region?

    Overall really annoyed that Bioware haven't fixed the issue. I know it can't be easy, but dozens of people have been complaining about this both here and on reddit, and I shouldn't have to restart a whole game hoping this time it doesn't crash just because there's something wrong in the code.

    Thanks for trying to help tho! Really hope some devs take notice of the problem.