How to Fix Ark: Survival Ascended Stuck on Character Creation and Crashing

Many games released in 2023 on Unreal Engine 5 have had some performance or stability issues. In this guide, I’ll go over how to fix Ark: Survival Ascended stuck on character creation and crashing.

Ark Survival Ascended: How to Fix Crashing in Character Creation

Some players, myself included, have run into a big hitch when making a new character in Ark Survival Ascended: crashes during or when loading into character creation. In my case, the game locked up and closed during creation. For others, ASA freezes, and they get stuck on character creation, forcing them to shut down their device. This odd issue seems to be more of a bug than an optimization problem. As such, I’ve compiled possible fixes to try, so you can get your character made and dive into ASA.

Update Your Video Card Drivers

The most obvious option comes first: Simply updating the drivers for your GPU. You can use Nvidia Experience if you’re using an Nvidia card or AMD Adrenalin if using an AMD one. Either software offers easy and even automatic driver updates. If your drivers are up to date and you’re still stuck on Ark Survival Ascended character creation, it’s time to dig into some more focused fixes.

Disable DLSS in Your Settings

Head into your Ark: Survival Ascended graphics settings and hunt down DLSS, then outright turn it off. DLSS is causing a lot of Ark players issues right now. Be sure to turn off frame generation as well, at least for character creation. You’ll probably want to turn it back on once you’re in-game, though, unless it causes further crashing.

Force the Game to Run in DirectX 11

This is the one that resolved crashing for me, and it doesn’t impact performance as much as the above fix. Make sure the game is closed on Steam, then go through the following steps to force ASA to launch using DirectX 11:

1. Right-click Ark: Survival Ascended in your Steam Library.
2. Click on “Properties.”
3. Look for “Launch Options” under the General tab.
4. Type in “-dx11” without the quotation marks.
5. Close out of Properties and relaunch the game.

Play Ark Survival Ascended at a Lower Resolution in Windowed Mode

This is a bit of a weird one, but I’ve seen it work for some people and it might work for you. In ASA’s settings, change the game’s resolution to one lower than your monitor’s and switch to Windowed Mode. You also want to remove Clouds from the game. Maybe it’s because of how taxing the game is on our hardware, but regardless, this appears to work. So it’s definitely worth trying.

Cap Ark Survival Ascended’s Framerate at 30 FPS

The framerate for ASA is automatically set at 60 FPS. This can cause the game to freeze when loading into different menus, including character creation. Capping it to 30 FPS reduces the chance of this occurring. Once you’re loaded into a server, you can change it back to 60, or some other number that works for your device.

That’s how to fix crashing during character creation in Ark Survival Ascended. Survival Evolved players will find themselves right at home with the remaster, and it looks amazing. With luck, one of these character creation crashing fixes will help you get into Ark: Survival Ascended so you can have some fun. Look for more guides on the game here on GameSkinny, such as our complete dino list and best creatures with unique abilities.