I also have 32GB RAM and had, like, a couple dozens of crashes (~185 hours total playtime).
Not frequent enough too be a problem. Though, my crashes were always at loading screen, fast-travel, or when I tried to quit to title screen.
I had seen people on twitch had this game freeze and crashed during gameplay, but that never happened to me.
I also never managed to open it without crashing. until one day I learned a (strange) trick.
as soon as you click to open the game, you should quickly click anywhere on your desktop, steam etc. then it opens without problems and working properly
The reason no AAA company was able to emulate the same appeal as BOTW is due to it’s simplicity. BOTW starts you off with nothing. No story, no items, no long ass cutscene. Just an opening cinematic and throws you into the game and lets you (the player) figure everything out. That is why I loved BOTW. It didn’t hold your hand at the start. It just let you explore on your own and didn’t force you to go in one singular direction. Most studios that try to emulate it, but then focus to much in one area i.e Cooking, Stamina, Climbing, or even building. BOTW is a decent balance to every direction that doesn’t add to much of one thing. BOTW was a change in the Zelda formula that I appreciated.
Hmm. There’s also the approach to the map view, in that you’re required to unlock portions of the map, instead of being given an overview of what to expect in the game as soon as you open the map. It’s fun to climb Sheikah towers just to reveal the map bit by bit, and sometimes the towers pose a challenge to climb. And then you randomly bump into different things when you traverse the world (lynels, villages, bears etc without spoiling much).
And if i remember correctly, they even fought against the usual cliche player traversal. They did this by play testing and seeing where and how everyone would move forward in the world, basically trying to understand where players would expect to find something, and then they went against that by placing everything in different spots instead.
Every inch of the map feels intentional, and even now when i revisit the game, there’s always something out there to surprise me. Most open worlds just boil down to copy and paste side missions and collectables scattered around a large map, notably Ubisoft open worlds do this, and BOTW defies this really well.
And then there’s the music that accompanies you on your journey, i guess it speaks for itself 
So, basically Dark Souls for kids.
… I’m not sure how I’m supposed to read this paragraph…
It’s basically Ubisoft The Game™ in how it handles the map view – a design choice otherwise frequently lambasted due to how overused it is in games since Ubisoft popularized the design.
Doesn’t the AC games just make you climb to a certain spot and synchronise so you can see where missions are located? BOTW doesn’t tell you where everything is, it just slowly reveals more of the map and creates a fast travel point. Plus going up to a synchronise spot in AC has always felt and played the same way in every AC game in my experience, nothing to challenge you in your attempt to get to each point.
With BOTW, you also use the elevated view to decide where you want to go next, with the help of those binoculars (whatever they’re called). Plus you get different obstacles for some towers, it takes some level of thought to climb some of the towers.
Basically put, AC’s approach feels like a grind, while BOTW actually has me willing to climb towers.
i get a metal gear alert sound when i crash too which i know is for specialk
They all work basically the same way. You climb some form of high point – sometimes with some form of “puzzle” involved – and “synchronizes” or whatever that reveals the topology of the vicinity and sometimes points of interests as well.
- Assassin’s Creed had its viewpoints.
- BOTW has its Sheikah Towers.
- Watch Dogs 1 had its CTOS towers.
- Shadow of Mordor had its Forge Towers.
And so on and so forth.
They’re all just minor variations of the same theme, and Breath of the Wild does nothing groundbreaking in that regard.
Does the game crash without Special K ? If so, then it’s the game itself that’s crashing.
The sound effect is just Special K’s crash handler telling you that it has captured some data surrounding the crash, but as the game is crash-prone as hell that data isn’t really of much relevance to anyone except the game devs (at which point they probably don’t want Special K involved either as that would influence the captured data from the expected baseline).
the game does not crash with specialk off.
Well, in that case unless you really need Special K you can always play the game without it.
If you still want to play using Special K you’ll have to provide the various logs that were gathered in the crash, such as crash.log, dxgi.log (or SpecialK.log), and modules.log.
i fixed it. i needed to run the HZD.exe as administrator. simple fix but wasn’t aware originally nonetheless. crash.log said it was an exception access violation
Can you name me games that reveal just the topology and not any missions etc?
BOTW adds different obstacles per tower, i’ve never experienced that in the Ubisoft games i’ve played. Granted, i’ve never bothered to finish any Ubisoft open worlds, they don’t take long to bore me.
Being littered with missions all over your map view just directs the player to too many options and feels overwhelming and choreful. BOTW’s approach is just “do what you want, you’ll find something”. As i mentioned before, Sheikah towers are useful for surveying the area, and the world design plays a role in this too, but that brings up a whole other conversation. Basically put, BOTW’s world doesn’t try to stuff you constantly with things to do wherever you walk on the map, it’s okay with a lot of empty, but deliberate spaces to give it breathing room. This approach also means scouting from above will help you decide how you want to traverse the area. Climbing up towers doesn’t mark objectives on the map, instead you can use your binoculars to stamp points of interest.
BOTW’s paragliding mechanic also plays into its favour here, you’ve reached a high vertical point, it’s nice to jump off and glide over a large area quickly - for some, that makes climbing towers convenient when they want to travel faster. And you can fast travel back to the tower you activated, and glide again but in a different direction if you want to. Sometimes it’s even useful to glide from above, just to reach certain areas.
I never said it did, my point was that its approach contributes to the open world experience. If you can point me to a game that very closely resembles what BOTW did, then go ahead. I know AC doesn’t, having played most of them, some for close to twenty hours. All AC had to look forward to, was diving into a haystack after you’ve synchronised. Shadow Of War’s approach is just to create fast travel points and scanning around the map till the indicator suggests a point of interest, which are often blocked by terrain from where you’re standing - i can’t recall how Shadow Of Mordor was, but i do know it was very similar. Watch Dogs 1 was just, i don’t even want to remember that.
D3D12 is not for mortals. Games contracted to 3rd party studios for ports really should not be using D3D12. Obviously not all (but most) of the crashes are from D3D12, but getting D3D12 stable takes time away from other things that need to be done.
I’m sorry, but I don’t keep track of all variations of that video game trope and how games differ minutely in their implementations. The point was that BOTW really didn’t do anything special when compared to the heap of variations that have already been tested and used in all random games that used that trope regardless of developer (it wasn’t just Ubisoft, after all – they just popularized the use of it).
Hence why I said I wasn’t sure how I’m supposed to read your initial paragraph on the subject, as it’s basically the same trope done the same overall way with the same tiny variation as games usually differs between (like those games that basically have and make use of the same exact trope, but instead of towers they have some other replacement object instead).
Mhm, at least they’re still working on it…
By the way, could you take a look and see if they fixed the 8-bit HDR swapchain thingy you spotted at least? I hope their reference to the colorbanding at least means they started using a swapchain of a higher bit depth this time around.
Huzzah!
09/09/2020 20:54:35.728: [Swap Chain]
+-------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Resolution. | 1920x1080 @ nan Hz |
| Format..... | DXGI_FORMAT_R10G10B10A2_UNORM |
| Buffers.... | 2 |
| MSAA....... | Not Used (or Offscreen) |
| Mode....... | Windowed |
| Scaling.... | Unspecified |
| Scanlines.. | Unspecified |
| Flags...... | 0x0802 |
| SwapEffect. | Flip Discard |
+-------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
That’s 10-bit color.
Floating-point 16-bit HDR would be better, but alas, very few games support that 
( SK does though, because SK doesn’t half-ass things 
)
Ah, nice! At least that issue has been taken care of 
There’s the minor issue of … Steam doesn’t know how to take 10-bit HDR screenshots. I’ve dangled a patch to make their overlay HDR compatible and capture 10-bit / 16-bit FP HDR images in Valve’s face a couple of times now, they never responded :-\
Oh yes… HDR looks much better in 10-bit, lol. WTF were they smoking?