Musings on my long history of frequent game crashes

Forza Horizon Legacy Horizon FH3 Discussion
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I had a not-so-fun yesterday trying to figure out why the game started crashing every 5-10 minutes. Ever since I got it in early October, it has averaged about one crash a day–which is very high for a AAA title from developers with this pedigree. But yesterday, it moved into a whole new league of dysfunction. On one of those crashes, the system itself decided to shut down and reboot. Given the way games run on the Xbox, that’s a red flag for a system issue. (A game or app can’t crash the system on its own.) So I moved the game to the internal drive, and it hasn’t crashed since. I played a couple of hours last night, and about 5 hours today. I’ve repeatedly entered and exited festivals, which were a favorite crash spot before. Rock-steady.

That brings up a couple of points. One, obviously, is that I need a new external. I’ve completely lost confidence in it now, and will be relegated to backup duty. I’ll copy all my games from it to the new drive when I get it. Two, which is why I created this thread, is that FH3 seems to be very sensitive to hard-drive missed reads. Properly robust code won’t crash because of an I/O failure. It will retry a set number of times, then if unsuccessful, it will throw up an error and exit gracefully. I recommend to whoever has FH3 installed on an external, and has been having crashing issues, to move the game to the internal drive, and give it a go. I also recommend to the techies at Turn 10/Playground to tighten up their error handling on drive-I/O code.
Update edit: The game was on for at least 12 hours yesterday, without a single crash or issue requiring a game exit. Clearly, the instability from before was the fault of the external drive, exacerbated by a lack of effective hard-drive error handling in the game code.

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Epic update: Strike all that I said above. Forget I ever said it. My external drive is fine. All my 3 drives are fine, since I bought a 2nd external, and the Xbox has its internal drive. I’ve run the game from all 3 drives, and I’ve deleted and re-downloaded it from XBL; its problems persist regardless of where it runs from, and regardless of official reinstalls. They persist regardless of multiple full system resets. And they persist regardless of game profile. Playing under a 2nd, silver profile worked well, until I unlocked the Forzathon. This too was the trigger for the constant crashing under my main Gold profile. I wasn’t sure about that until I had the same experience with the Silver. I know the problem is related to online communications now, because playing offline makes the game stable again. It’s a night-and-day difference in reliability. And to think I almost bought a new console too, because of this.

The mystery remains, however. I have no such problems with any other games, including FH2. I do know for a fact, though, that NONE of these are causes:

  • My Xbox CPU or GPU overheating (issue happens regardless of how long system is on, and only happens while online–no other games fail)
  • My hard drives
  • My USB cable to the external drive
  • My Xbox built-in rear USB hub (where the ext drive is connected)
  • The installed game image
  • My game profile

That leaves precious little that I can think of. The game simply cannot walk and chew gum at the same time here. It’s trampling over itself for some obscure communications or sync issue.

I’m done chasing this. I’ll continue playing offline, and go online occasionally to sync my profile on the XBL server, and to attempt things like Forzathons and getting liveries. Very often the thing crashes before I get out of the garage, so doing anything other than allowing a sync may be quite a challenge. I can’t say I haven’t gotten my money’s worth out of FH3. I sure have. But in this condition, it certainly does not merit any additional expenditure.

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Sounds like maybe internet congestion. Now dont go testing download, upload speeds.

I had similar issues in Neverwinter which is only online.

My.problem was that the main internet cables my isp usually uses between Sydney and LA i think were out of action so my connection to the NW servers went via Hong Kong where it bogged down, then to East Coast of USA and then back to west coast. My ping to the game servers blew out to the point it would regularly time out which made my console have a fit.

You could try running tracert from your pc but you.need to know the address of the game server or somewhere close to it.

Edit: When online do you often get server not available when trying to read messages in FH3?

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I was about to post that it can’t be my portable because fh3 is the only game that has crashed this frequently, ive had maybe one other crash since I migrated my library to it. Mine seems to crash most while entering festivals, saving liveries, and putting cars up for auction.

Bethesda games crash less than fh3…I never thought any dev would beat Bethesda at their own game.

1 Like
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This is very similar to my experience, except I’ve moved down from that level of frustration to a deep pit of despair. Sometimes just ticking the “Favorites” filter in the garage will freeze the game with the familiar repeating sound buffer (like a buzz saw). If not that, then when I exit the garage. If I survive that, then driving out of the festival and turning toward the beach. It’s the kind of experience I had when my original 360 started failing. (It RRoD’d shortly thereafter.) So I immediately thought the One’s cooler had gone bad, but no. Going offline, everything’s fine–for many hours. Playing other games while online, everything’s fine for extended sessions. It’s just FH3, and it’s just online.

The Forzathon seems to trigger it. There is some change in the game based on when these go active, and that seems to play a part.

Thanks for your post, Eduardo. I suppose it’s possible that there is something less than ideal about my connection to the servers, though if there is, I can’t say. Everything seems fine otherwise, and I get a steady 16-17 mbps when when downloading games. I have no issues with Youtube or Edge. I have no issues with other connected games. If I come across anything telling, I will speak up. Thanks for the suggestions. I will keep this all in mind.

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If you run a network test (cant remember the exact name) on your console what ping do you get?

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I’m becoming convinced the good periods of stability followed by incessant crashing are related to the Forzathon. That changes something in the game, which perhaps conflicts with whatever has been cached. It immediately crashed on me today after getting the message of the Forzathon being active. I’m draining the cache right now (console off and unplugged) to see if that solves a problem we should not be having, coming from any reputable developer.

Update: Yeah, I still think it’s related to this, but there’s more to it than that. A cache flush did not solve it. I’m doing another right now. Every couple of cars I buy, the game crashes, after 2-3 days of near-perfect stability. The console was off since last night, before going into FH3, and it’s 70 degrees F in here, so once again I can verify it has nothing to do with overheating.

The process of buying for least money involves exiting the festival, getting the “Made to Order” perk, going into the festival and autoshow, buying a car, rinse and repeat. Twice it crashed when attempting to get the perk, and once when scrolling through the cars in the autoshow.

More to come . . .

Update 2: I managed to spend my cash down to below a million, and get all the expensive cars I wanted in the Forzathon. Crashes were frequent, but never caused data loss. After I was done with this, I could not even get out of the festival area without a crash. After a couple of game reboots with no improvement, I took the console offline. I’ve been playing for over an hour since without issue.

Without a doubt, the network I/O is at the center of this, and seems to get toxic when something changes from the usual (e.g., the Forzathon). That doesn’t mean this alone is causing it. It may well be a combination of factors. But regardless, the responsibility rests squarely with the developer. No external event will crash properly written code.

Number of profiles this issue affects severely: 2
Number of hard drives the game has been installed on, and run from: 3
Number of game uninstalls and reinstalls from the server: 2

Games which I have been playing recently while online, without any issues:

Forza Motorsport 6
Forza Horizon 2
ReCore
Doom (2016)
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
Far Cry: Primal

. . .
Edit: Since Eduardo asked:

Detailed network statistics (as reported by the Xbox)

Download speed - 15.98 Mbps
Upload speed - 1.18 Mbps
Packet loss - 0%
MTU - 1480
Latency - 87 ms

Update (11/28/16): The Forzathon is no longer active today, and my game is stable online again. Played several hours without crashing today, including Goliath and other races, going to festivals, scrolling through all cars in the garage, changing cars, upgrading and tuning.

Clearly, without a doubt now, whatever the Forzathon is changing in how the game operates is to blame. I wonder if the code follows 2 different paths, with some duplicated or same-purpose objects/subroutines. Is it possible that these duplicated or same-purpose objects were updated (made more robust) on one code path, but neglected on the other? This can easily happen in a large project, where different people are responsible for different code branches.

The deficiency doesn’t manifest itself to everyone, or there would be utter chaos in these forums and on support requests. I guess in this instance, I’m IT–I’m Murphy’s Law’s emergence. Lucky me.

Anyway, just speculating. At least now I know exactly how to work around this. If a Forzathon goes active, and the game can’t go 3 minutes without a crash, play offline. Not ideal, but until someone wakes up at that end, it will have to do.