ME2 PC freezing on Normandy

Same is happening to me. I can count five times it has occurred to me so far.

I'm currently on the latest patch/update. Running via Steam.

Off the top of my head, two times I can remember was:
- After talking with Jack, then heading upstairs to speak with Tali. Game froze as soon as I entered the engineering room.

- After talking with Garrus, Game froze when I went back into the mess hall. Strangely, this wasn't instant. I got about halfway between the hallway between the weapons room and the mess before it happened (if I look at it from a map perspective, this is possibly the loading barrier for the AI core).

As an additional note, every time this had happened to me the audio has glitched out before hand.

The background audio would disappear, characters would have no audio playing when they were talking, footstep sounds were sometimes working, and sometimes not.

So. I wonder if there is perhaps an overload going on in regards to the audio which is causing the freeze?

May or may not be related. I have been able to continue playing even when the audio glitches out and the game eventually fixes itself. But in the same vein, each time I've frozen, the audio was also glitched.

@DiamondPlatinum3Now that I think about it, the crashes happened at basically those same points.

@holger1405Here's the file, though I've already finished the game so I can't really test it anymore. But if someone else is still playing the game and experiencing the same bug they can try to test it.

Here we go =)

I have been getting these issues when using 'LU28R55 (NVIDIA High Definition Audio)' as my audio output.

To test your request, I switched over to the 'Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)' audio output and was able to play for without any issue (well, I had a graphical issue where Shepard would be facing 90 degrees to the right in combat and making it really awkward for me to aim since the gun wasn't visually pointing to where it was firing, but the game sorted itself out) for roughly 5 missions or so before I put the game down for the day.

To be fair though, I can't say for sure that this is a good test case on my part. I am currently at the point where the crew only talks about how they want me to do their loyalty missions so I'm not exactly jumping into every single room now to talk to everyone like I was before. But that is something at least.

@Asintg 

NP, thanks!

@DiamondPlatinum3 

Seeing the "ntdll.dll" error in your DxDiag makes me believe we found the culprit and your description of glitched out audio makes this even more likely.

It might help to clean install all NVIDIA driver components with DDU, but I can't promises it.

Hello again. =)

I believe that might have been a red herring. The two sound devices with that issue are included as part of virtual machine setups I have on my PC.

They aren't really necessary for me, so I've uninstalled those drivers, redid the DxDiag, and attached it here. The same audio devices I used in both of my tests still pop up, although there are no issues to note in DxDiag's notes now.

With that said, with the problematic ones now removed; next time I play I'll switch back to the audio device that I was playing on when I had the issues (I was still playing on the same rendering device in both cases) and let you know if it pops up again. =)

Okiedokie, so last update from me =)

I played for a few hours again. I tried whizzing all around the Normandy to recreate the issue.

I wasn't able to get the game to softlock. But I was able to get the audio issue twice.

The audio issues specifically being:
- The background music will stop playing (elevator/loading music, or the galaxy map music),

- Dialogue will stop playing when speaking to characters.

Issues happened:

- One time happened when I opened the galaxy map and started flying around (can't really remember what I was doing before that... probably purchasing upgrades in Mordin's room).

- Second time as I approached Joker in the cockpit after speaking to everyone in the Crew Deck (in order: Kasumi, Thane, Samara, Legion, Garrus, Miranda)

This really isn't a big deal as the game will resolve itself after a minute or two. It's just a bit immersion breaking as character's won't be playing dialogue anymore.

But regardless, the freezing seems to have resolved itself (or at least I don't have a reliable way to reproduce it), and my audio issues above might not be related to the freezing issue, so this might not be relevant to this thread. I'm about to do the last few missions. So won't be able to report again as I move on Mass Effect 3.

I hope the DxDialg helps if a developer stumbles across this 🙂