There used to be a whole bunch of locations where the game would freeze up for a little bit when the player walked through. Most of them have been eliminated over the years but there are two I can think of off the top of my head that still remain.
One is in Ugdenbog, in the area before Coven’s Refuge (my char is past the entrance to the Refuge):
There’s never anything in this eastern alcove but walk too close and you get a freeze.
Another one is in the Steelcap District outpost, on the stone stairs leading up to the Spirit Guide. It microfreezes there every playthrough when I go talk to Ivonda for her quest or go open her reward chest.
Found another one, near the Sunbane Oasis Rift, in the hidden passage leading to the Shrine of Azaleon. It microfreezes near the end of the north-south section, close to where the passage bends right.
alright, so it’s no longer a consistent everytime, and my memory is a bit fuzzy on the 3rd
*this in when you arrive at homestead/haven’t done clearing the farm quest
pink, “right out the gates” so to speak, i can see what happens; the dermapteran spawn in *
had a few around blue, but like a said not consistent anymore
and green is where i think i recall “it used to be”
*anyway, pink being so obvious these days, tho always kinda thought it was it, is that it’s the game loading in “whatever” in the zone ahead, always sorta seemed to fit for me back in the day on the green zone, and now it’s shifted to pink/“can literally see the dermapteran spawn in before my eyes” i sorta just thought of that as confirmation
every micro freeze like that, going up the stairs in Steelcap base, always gave me that notion of “now the game is rendering/loading in new stuff ahead”,
i did manage to completely remove all traces of it at some point via Nvidia Inspector, and some settings stuff among others, but i just couldn’t play like that (screen tearing etc)
Can’t test the pink one cause all characters I have that can access it already completed the quest so no enemies load. The blue one didn’t freeze for me once out of 5 attempts. Green microfreezes about midway through the aetherfire corridor, but it’s sooo brief for me it’s almost imperceptible. The ones I listed above freeze for about three times as long.
I’m not sure it has something to do with the game loading stuff cause the Steelcap one should already have everything loaded when you’re coming from the Steelcap riftgate. Similarly there should be nothing to load for the small alcove in Ugdenbog, the whole rest of the Ugdenbog area is already loaded. I always thought it might just be some issue with the map, like there’s some obstruction in the map mesh (I’m no programmer so I might be talking nonsense) that the game has a hard time processing for a sec.
Though it is true the game also microfreezes whenever I craft an item (the character model in the inventory window freezes for a bit) but then again, it happens even if I craft an item I already have in the inventory, so it’s not like it needs to load the sprite for it again.
Hm, maybe it does have something to do with loading after all. Just went to Sunbane Oasis rift, walked straight to the next zone (no freeze) then came back and went to the Azaleon corridor and suddenly no freeze. It freezes for me every time when I go there before I go further East. Weird that I’d freeze when loading in one place but not another, but either way, this bug report is useless I guess, if that’s the cause.
