This is actually not a bug report, but a fix report. I had this problem, and I searched for a solution everywhere, and none worked. So I went on a epic journey to fix it and thought I could at least post the solution to anyone else with the same issue.
Problem description:
When I open Conan Exiles, I receive an error message “The ue4-conansandbox game has crashed and will close”. If I click ok, the game closes immediately. If I don’t, the game curiously keep running normally. I can even play for a few minutes, but it eventually crashes.
How to reproduce:
Just open the game. It happens 100% of the times.
What have I done to try to fix:
Everything you can and can’t imagine.
I started by trying the simple solutions: Delete mod files, reinstalling graphics driver, giving admin accesses, checking integrity of files, redownloading the entire game. Nothing worked.
Then I went for something more critical. I formatted the whole Windows partition, and tried to run Conan with just Steam and the graphics drivers installed. The same problem.
Thinking it was some hardware issue, I tried to exchange hardware, piece by piece. First I changed the GPU. Same problem. Changed the ram sticks. Same problem. Changed power unit. Same problem. Changed SSD and downloaded again: solved.
Thinking it was an issue with a corrupted SSD, I thought the problem was soved. But then I noticed my single player games were missing. So I went to the save game folder in my old SSD and copied to the new SSD. Problem goes back.
Conclusion: It was just some problematic file in my single player game files. Even when you unninstall and redownload, the game keeps your saved files. So, if you’re going through this problem, try deleting your saved game files, located in:
…\Conan Exiles\ConanSandbox\Saved