So I'm at the point of desperation now because I don't know what to do. I've submitted a ticket to customer service (ticket #24178559), but the only thing I got back appeared to be an automated message that told me things I should try to fix my issue, but none of them worked!

Ever since 4.0 and, by extension, KotFE was launched, I've been having issues with playing my characters through the KotFE storyline. For some reason that I cannot explain or understand, my computer has been doing this thing where, at random and often the most unassuming times, the game will just freeze along with any onscreen images. In addition to this freezing I'll get some really loud warped/static/stuttering audio sounds that will persist for a couple of seconds and then stop suddenly. Most often my game and screen stays frozen until I have to restart my PC, rarely the game will fix itself.

This issue happens most often during cutscenes, often during the calmest scenes where the characters are just talking and there's nothing crazy happening visually. Occasionally I'll also experience this issue while in an instanced zone during a storyline mission for KotFE. Every time it happens in these instanced zones it occurs while I'm out of combat and doing something simple like walking around or picking up loot.

To make the cause of this issue even more of a mystery, it only happens when I'm doing something related to the KotFE storyline. I can play through other planet storylines, my 1-50 class quests, and even other expansions/add-ons like Makeb, Oricon, Ziost, etc. with no issues whatsoever. All these issues I have only happen during KotFE cutscenes or in instanced zones for the KotFE storyline. I also have had no issues even remotely like this while playing any other games on my PC.

This issue is absolutely bewildering to me because I can't find any probable cause for it. I'm running the game with the NVIDIA-optimized settings and my PC is an ASUS gaming desktop equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 graphics card. All other games I play I can run at 50-60 FPS 95% of the time, including SWTOR (the only planets that give me lower FPS are Alderaan and Voss, but I assume that goes for most everyone).

The message I got from support suggested that I completely uninstall my graphics driver and then reinstall it. I did so and got no noticeable difference with regards to fixing my issue. The rest of the suggestions provided related to connection issues and a bugged launcher, neither of which are related to my issue as this isn't caused by poor connection (which my connection isn't) and I have no issues launching the game or playing the non-KotFE portions.

I searched these forums as well as the EA support forums for possible solutions and the best I got was something called GPU throttling. The symptoms described were similar to what I'm experiencing, and I tried all suggested fixes to it including making sure my PC only uses the NVIDIA GPU instead of the built-in GPU. None of those solutions made an improvement. Also, considering what causes GPU throttling, I would've expected my game freezing/crashing to occur during more system-intensive cutscenes and gameplay, not very calm and simple moments.

At this point I'll take any and all suggestions you lovely people can provide me with. I'm desperate! At this point I can barely make it through a single chapter of KotFE without the game freezing/crashing and me restarting my PC. This is especially bad because I have 19 characters that all need to go through KotFE, but I really can't deal with this seemingly unexplainable issue any longer and therefore cannot progress any of my characters further in SWTOR without shattering my keyboard in frustration. As the title suggests, PLEASE HELP ME!

That really does sound like a graphics card driver issue. Do you have the latest from nVidia? Is it a beta version? You may even have to revert to the version just prior to the latest.

I had an issue a while back that only happened in SWTOR, and only on cut-scenes. The screen would freeze for a few seconds, go blank for a few seconds, then it would be fine. It was my graphics driver. I have an AMD/ATI HD 7950 card. I just had to deal with it until they came out with drivers that fixed it.

That really does sound like a graphics card driver issue. Do you have the latest from nVidia? Is it a beta version? You may even have to revert to the version just prior to the latest.

 

I had an issue a while back that only happened in SWTOR, and only on cut-scenes. The screen would freeze for a few seconds, go blank for a few seconds, then it would be fine. It was my graphics driver. I have an AMD/ATI HD 7950 card. I just had to deal with it until they came out with drivers that fixed it.

My GeForce Experience panel tells me my NVIDIA driver is up-to-date when I try checking for updates, and it doesn't appear to be a beta version. I don't believe reverting to the version prior to latest will help, as I've been having this issue since day 1 of KotFE, which was released 5-6 months ago. Since then I must've updated my graphics driver 8-10 times, with none of those updates fixing the issue.

The funny thing is that I believed at first that these issues were just related to some early bugs for KotFE when it was launched. I ended up taking a break from SWTOR after those initial weeks of KotFE in the hopes that it would be fixed. Started seriously playing SWTOR again a few weeks ago and, much to my dismay, the issue still persists.