Game freezes for long periods when opening menus and performing certain actions

Technical Support
1

My patience is wearing thin with Diablo 4 and its incessant freezing when attempting to open menus and performing certain actions, such as fast travel.

The freezes apply to specific menu items. For example, the game does not typically freeze when opening the inventory, or the map.

They will always occur after logging into the game for the first time. After opening a cursed menu, and experiencing the freeze-up, the menu will become temporarily “fixed”, meaning you can navigate to that menu without delay for a period of time, usually just long enough for you to forget about the problem before it slaps you again.

The game can freeze from anywhere between 20 seconds to upwards of 3 minutes.

The worst offenders are:

  • Fast travel
  • Entering a different area, usually where a loading screen is involved
  • The social menu
  • The clan menu
  • Opening your “profile” from the inventory
  • Changing graphical settings (occasional)
  • Opening skill menu (periodic, always on first opening during a session)
  • Navigating inventory screen (rare)

Typically when the freeze lasts more than three minutes, a message on the top left corner of the screen will appear, saying “Reconnecting to Diablo IV”. If you are not booted from the game, you will be able to continue playing as normal, however, the message will not disappear and you will not be able to access most online services. For example, your “Social” menu will appear as empty. You will not be able to change zones or fast travel. However, any progress you make, such as experience gained and quest progress will persist when you eventually relog to fix the issue.

Please note that there are claims circulating the internet that installing or uninstalling “High Resolution Assets” has resulted in the issue being improved or fixed for some users.

In my case, I did not have “High Resolution Assets” installed. I am enduring another 40GB download in a rural location with abysmal speeds just to try and play. If the game is broke one way or another, the option should never have been included.

This needs to be patched. It’s ridiculous. Also, if anyone has been able to fix or improve this problem, please let us know.

EDIT (MY SPECS):

MSI GF63 Thin 11SC Laptop

Nvidia GTX 1650
i5-11400H @ 2.70 GHz
16GB DDR4-3200 RAM

(Yes, I know I’m low end - but aside from this freezing issue the game runs fine! I have no stuttering or FPS drops from a performance standpoint.)

EDIT #2:

:bangbang: :bangbang: :bangbang:

Updating the installation with High Quality Assets ticked has resolved the issue.

:bangbang: :bangbang: :bangbang:

You can do this by clicking the settings button (cog icon next to play) and selecting “Modifying Install”. It is on the second page.

I suggest others should consider doing this if other methods have failed for them.
It seems that this is fixing the problem for most people encountering the issue.

It’s worth noting, however, that there are claims that uninstalling the assets has resolved other performance related issues for some users. I have not experienced any adverse effects so far.

18 Likes
2

I have this exact issue, never a single performance issue with any of the Betas. I do not currently have high rest textures installed. Graphics settings do not seem to affect anything.

Ryzen 5600x
Radeon 6800XT

3

Installing high quality assets has resolved the issue completely for me.

4

Exact same issues here too, thought it was my system at fault, maybe the memory maybe the SSD but after checking the Fenrir debug it looks like when accesing a vendor or teleport or chest or when it feels like it, the game tries to get data that isn’t there, times out than tries a different server and another until the freeze ends.
Downloading the high textures pack now at 2mb/s so see you in a couple of days.

1 Like
5

+1 Had the same issue, downloading high quality assets fixed it as well

2 Likes
6

Is this for PC only? I’m having the same issues on XBox…

1 Like
7

I am having the same issue on PC with fairly high spec PC RTX3080 128GB ram 9560x I dont think its the computer and I also have the high rez pack installed. I will try uninstall and reinstall

8

Kaner,

I would be interested to hear if uninstalling the high resolution assets fixes the problem for you, seeing as installing them seems to fix the problem for most people who don’t have them installed.

Of course, reinstalling the game (or the assets) may also fix this for you. Please let us know. :slight_smile:

1 Like
9

same problem here
kind of short freeze
high res installed

edit : no freeze in low graphics cant play smooth in ultra

10

Having the exact same problem, but on a PS5. Currently getting stuck if I dare to open the inventory.

2 Likes
11

I had most of the same issues when I left out the high-res assets. The only exception was that I do not recall seeing the “reconnecting to Diablo IV” message. I did, however, see that message after installing the high-res pack.

People I grouped with told me that the system showed me as offline during warp transitions etc., generally taking 2 or 3 minutes.

It literally took me 10 minutes odd to just do the following group of basic actions (total for all three):

  • Join a multi-player game
  • Warp to a town
  • Take a town portal to join the other people

Oddly enough, the other people were less than happy with waiting.

This did not happen during the Beta, but I know I had the complete install (I don’t think it was an option for Beta anyway).

I installed the high-res assets and re-tested for a couple of hours. At this point, merely installing the high-res pack appears to have fixed the following issues (nothing else was done to the computer or game in the meantime):

  • Fast travel (game froze, then loading screen; ~3 minutes)
  • Entering a different area, such as a dungeon (game froze, then loading screen; ~3 minutes)
  • The social menu (clicking on anyone in the menu froze the game for ~3 minutes)
  • Opening your “profile” from the inventory (game froze for ~3 minutes)
  • Opening inventory screen (first time in a session always froze for ~3 minutes; subsequent uses work for 5 minutes or so before doing it again).
  • Opening vendors (game froze for ~ 3 minutes; unsure if this is only due to it opening the inventory as well, or a separate issue).
  • Objects dropped on field were invisible for some time: Interacting with a field object and getting a drop (e.g. reward cache, armour stand etc.) or just dropping an item from inventory onto the field, could be greatly delayed in showing up on the field itself. The items were generally there, and could be picked up if they were of the “walk-over” type, but were invisible. Non-“walk-over” types required walking away so the item was off-screen, then coming back again to get them to display.
  • Legendaries were usually missing tooltips: When navigating the inventory, newly picked-up Legendary items (usually) had no tooltip. This could sometimes be resolved by equipping them, then returning them to inventory, but not always. As Legendaries are hardly common, I can only go off the two that have dropped so far.

Edited to clarify and summarise.

1 Like
12

Also experiencing this issue with a new high end system. First load of game stalls, opening new areas, first load of skill tree, some aspect screen thing, some vendors on first load. The SSD doesn’t have activity during the stalls I think it must be network timeout related.
Have high res assets installed during initial install (today). scan and repair detected nothing.

1 Like
13

Same issue. It didn’t happen yesterday to me at all (June 5th, 2023), but now it’s ridiculous. I already have High Res Assets, so that’s not the fix for me. I don’t know what happened between yesterday and today, but now, it’s horrible. Makes playing the game incredibly difficult.

14

This just started in the last 30 minute for me. Playing, and the game just freezes. One time from pressing the letter E. Another time for pressing the letter I on the keyboard. I had to control alt delete to and the game the first time he came back in the game and it’s the same issue.

15

Same here, but the weird part is that it didn´t start until yesterday. Played for three days with zero problems! My PC is: i5-2500k, GTX 970 and 8Gb RAM so, very minimum but yeah, no problems until about 24h hours ago.

edit: Removed the high res pack and installed it again and now the game runs smooth again.

16

I’m having this issue also. Really good gaming rig with no problems on any other top end game. I don’t think it is SSD related because task manager shows no disk access / networking being done when the delays occur. The cpu usage is also really low when the issue occurs. Happens during first load of any area + first load of screens such as skill tree or aspects page. Takes minutes to come back. Feels like a network timeout but have checked windows defender settings and allow D4 and bnet.
I’ve also tried setting d4 launcher and d4 exe to run as administrator. I’ve cleared the d4 and bnet cache. I’ve got the latest drivers for everything I can think of including the GEForce D4 ready version.

1 Like
17

I don’t know what they were smoking designing this game. My rig is RTX 2060 8gb, 16gb ram, i’ve been playing early beta/official beta without high-res assets and everything was ok. But since early access on june 2th i’m getting the same issues moreover putting everything on low level resolves the issue only partially, while transitioning to the new area esp while Hell Tide event screen just doesn’t allow me to move toward my destination, my character starts to jump all over the place and no buttons are working. I need to manually go back to the camp point and then port out of that camp to the other one where the Hell Tide is running. Also while running game on high settings my temps were 79-80 which is ok coz im playing on a laptop. However switching to low settings my temps are 85-86… like why? If this won’t be fixed in the next week i’m prob gonna issue a refund, 120$ for something that can’t be played smoothly which was Blizzards trademark for complete products is a complete absurd.

18

Same issue here. Did not install the high-res pack because I game at 1080p. Had zero problems with the beta. Surprised that installing low-res assets makes the game run slower lol.

Update: Installing the High-res pack did not resolve my issue. I thought it did, then after a few minutes of play game froze when I clicked on a deer, then Battle.Net kicked me out.

Gonna give it a week, if it still isn’t fixed I will get this game refunded. Ridiculous. Between these technical issues and Diablo 4 in general being a badly designed, boring MMO I think I can quit while I’m ahead.

1 Like
19

My issue with it is fixed. I had done the initial install today with the high res pack. had to modify install to remove the high res pack then modify the install to add the high res pack. everything is quick now

20

I installed the high res pack and didn’t fix the issue.
Reinstalling from fresh install now. But now my download with Battle.net is only 50kb/s. LOL maybe Diablo 4 will finish installing next year.

I think it has nothing to do with high res packs. I think it’s a network issue, my ISP and Diablo 4’s servers just not getting along.