Dead Island Troubleshooting Crashes and Errors

This troubleshooting guide will help you solve and permanently fix most if not all the problems with Dead Island on PC so you can have a better experience

Dead Island is buggy to an extent that people easily bought the statement by Techland/Deep Silver that they have coincidentally released a beta build. PC gamers experience errors, crashes, freezes and all sorts of game-breaking issues when they try to launch the game but our Dead Island troubleshooting guide should help to some extent.

Dead Island Troubleshooting Crashes and Errors

Is it the really the beta build or the game in itself is broken? We will never know but for now, we will take what we are told by developer/publisher. More importantly, Dead Island hasn’t been fixed even after a huge Day 1 patch.

So, here we are again with another troubleshooting guide that has all the possible workarounds to fix the current issues that you may experience while playing Dead Island.

1# Lock Up at Start/Black Screen at Launch
Disable all but primary monitor, disable all extra USB devices to resolve this issue. You can disable Desktop compositing in the compatiblity menu for the game’s executable to fix Black Screen at launch.

2# Dead Island Slow, Stuttering, Lag Fix
Go to my documents\deadisland\out\settings\video.scr, open it in notepad, and changed VSync() to VSync(disable). Graphics won’t be that smooth but it will increase performance and fix lag and stuttering.

3# How To Increase Shadow Resolution ?
You can increase the shadow resolution by navigating to this directory and opening “video.scr” in Notepad. You can find it in this directory: Dead island\DI\Out\Settings. Once you have it opened, simple change these values:
Simply increase the following:

ShadowMapSize(1024)
SpotShadowMapSize(1024)

4# Character Save File Location ?
You can find it here – \Program Files\Steam\userdata\\91310\remote\out\save

5# How To Fix Audio Crackling/Static Sound
Goto the directory:

\Documents\DeadIsland\out\Settings

Open: “Audio.scr” with a text editor and Change:

API(“XAudio2”)

To

API(“aOpenAL”)

6# How To Change Refresh Rate?
You can open Video.scr and
Change:

MaxRefresh(60)

To any value you see fit, like:

MaxRefresh(120)

7# Can’t Change Resolution ?
Disable stereoscopic 3D in your drivers/video card control panel and you should be able to change the resolution. It’s a NVidia specific issues.

8# How To Fix Static Sound ?
Try changing your computer’s sound configuration and going back into the game to see if its fixed. You can put the sound to Speakers 5.1 to start the hit and trial.

9# Dead Island Temporary Stuttering Fix
The temporary fix is to set the game in LAN mode. You can do this by starting up the game and in the main menu, go to Options, click the Online tab up top and set “Game Visibility” to LAN. It’s a temporary fix till developers fix this issue in the patch, you should at least enjoy singleplayer mode in full swing. Or open Task Manager and setting DeadIslandGame.exe’s priority to Normal from Below Normal and see if that fixes the issue.

10# Dead Island Crash at Launch
Running Dead Island as a local user works fine.

11# Dead Island Windows Mouse Circular Bug
Disable Steam Overlay. This solves the problem, but is by no means a fix.

12# Black Screen When Launching The Game
If you are trying to run the game on dual-monitor, you may experience this issue. You can fix it by disabling one monitor.

13# SLI Support Doesn’t Work
Rename deadisland.exe to deadislandgame.exe through Nvidia Inspector to resolve the issue.

14# Fix For Black Screen With Dual Monitors
Go to

\Documents\DeadIsland\out\Settings

There should be a file called Video.scr. Open this in Notepad++ and edit this line: Monitor(0) Replace the 0 with -1. Save the file and start the game. It should work without the need to disable your second monitor.

If you face any other issue, let us know and we will try to help you out.

Avatar photo

Zawad Iftikhar is the founder of SegmentNext.com, an FPS enthusiast and a Call of Duty veteran, having participated multiple eSports competition.