Cutscene crashes

This is because of a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death). Change your Windows settings to not restart automatically on BSOD. That way you can see the error message and Google it. Hopefully you can then find the cause. You can also post the full error message here and we will look at it.

Strangely I turned auto-restart off a long time ago, even way before playing MEA for the first time. But it still does it. And MEA is the first game in a decade that gives me a BSOD.

This is the exact same issue.

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/PC-PC-restarts-during-opening-bridge-custscene-Video/td-p/5939553

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Crash-after-the-first-tram/m-p/5993732#M8838

And this is a similar issue.

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/Game-Freezes-when-first-entering-The-Nexus/m-p/5926894#U5926894

Yay, add one more crash to the mix: Cora's loyalty mission 1st cutscene. ☹️

Attach a fresh dxdiag.txt please

And another one. First and last cutscene of Liam's loyalty mission. I'm beginning to see a pattern here. It seems the game likes to crash when the Tempest interior is rendered on ultra settings.

Yup, definitely crashes in the Tempest interior, now also while orbiting comet Jarovbees in the Saajor system and then leaving the galaxy map going back to the bridge.

So, because Bioware are done with this game but I'm still playing it I took matters into my own hands and did some more research. This is what I have come up with.

Ultra graphics settings are actually not "ultra", because they are not the maximum settings, which are commonly referred to as "ultra":

- Ambient Occlusion is set to HBAO instead of the max which is HBAO Full

- Depth of Field is set to High not Ultra

- Lighting Quality is set to High not Ultra

- Effects Quality is set to High not Ultra

The latter is the one that was the culprit for me, because I manually set all of the above to Ultra (the max) which results in the graphics settings preset option Overall Quality showing Custom instead of Ultra.

Setting Effects Quality back to High did the trick for me in one of the cutscenes that always caused crashes to play without crashing my game when I tested it. I haven't done extensive testing and I did not test all of the other cutscenes yet, but this should be a good pointer for anyone who experiences crashes with ultra or more than ultra settings.

As a rule of thumb I would say that graphics quality and the power of your system have an impact on how likely it is for your game to crash. If you have those cutscene crashes try lowering your settings, especially the ones I mentioned above.

I hope this helps. And a happy new year!

I tried your solution and for most cutscenes I believe it works. I am still having problems with Cora's loyalty mission. Inside the Tempest, I make it to the end where Kalo says he found the ship and you start to view it. The game crashes.

I have changed Radeon Software to display a maximum of 60fps (This stopped the cutscene at the beginning of the game from crashing)  Ambient Occlusion is set to HBAO. Depth of Field is set to OFF.  Lighting Quality is set to High. Effects Quality is set to High. Everything else is on Ultra. This works for me for most cutscenes. I have played this through about 20 times and the last 3 or 4 play throughs I just started having this problem. I used to have everything on Ultra and never had a crash on cutscenes that I remember.

I don't know what else to do to stop the problem on Cora's loyalty mission. Maybe something else is causing it. Any thoughts?