OOTP 21 Game crashes

[ewank]

The game is constantly crashing on me. I am playing the complete 2020 season, one day at a time and many times the game just stops and kicks me out. Sometimes this happens (as it did today) when a player gets injured. I place the new player in and the game just closes and I lose the game. This time I was in the top of the ninth in a 2-2 tie! Anyway, it does not crash if I am doing other franchise things only while playing an actual game. Has this been solved by the new update (which I did not know about until I came to the forums)?

[MrPerfect]

I just bought the game for the 1st time in a few years yesterday. First time through Steam. Tried to simple start a season and during the initial creation process it crashes. That happened twice yesterday. Then today an update file was downloaded and installed. Same thing, season won't even create for me. Huge bummer

[Lukas Berger]

There are some initial troubleshooting steps to try here: There are a few steps for you to try first though.
Try rebooting your system.
Update your graphic and sound card drivers (if you're on a PC). On a Mac make sure you have the latest OS update installed. If not, then please install it.
If you are on a PC, run the game / installer as admin (right-click on icon, select run as admin)
Also if you are on a PC, make sure to check the hard drive OOTP is installed on for errors/and or run defrag on it.
On Steam, make sure to uncheck the Steam overlay. Go to the Steam menu then to settings > in-game > and untick the 'enable the steam overlay while in game' checkbox.
If you use Discord, try turning that overlay off as well.
If you are in windowed mode try switching to fullscreen mode. In a few cases this has fixed issues with the game freezing for folks. We're working on figuring out a fix but this might help for now.
Go to settings > troubleshooting > force game data re-installation and click that. Let the game do its thing. Then restart your game and try again.
Another suggestion for anyone still having issues would be to update Direct X on your system to the latest version. That solved some crashing issues for at least one customer. Also, it might be worthwhile to make sure that you have the latest Microsoft Visual C+++ files installed (2017).
If that doesn't help, to try to narrow down what might be causing problems, try the following:
- First, restart your computer.
- Then make sure to create an exception or whitelist OOTP in your anti-virus and firewall programs. Or, even better, completely disable both for a little while (To reduce any risks, disconnect the computer from the network first).
- Then shut down any non-essential programs that are running other than OOTP.
- Then start OOTP up and try playing for a while and see if it still crashes in the same place.
- If not, then you'll basically just want to play the game without anything else running in the background, since one of those programs was likely causing issues with the game.
If the crash is happening when playing out a game in 3d, please try this: Go to the 3d and facegen screen on the settings tab and then set the audience detail to simplified, and/or lower the audience quality. If the game still crashes while playing out a game, try lowering both settings all the way and/or switching them off entirely. Also, go to 3d settings and select OpenGL with Fastblit mode and try playing a game with that set.

If they don't solve things for you, let us know and we'll get some more information from you and walk you through some more advanced troubleshooting.