after going through the event viewer on windows, there was an error on low virtual memory, increasing it fixed the crashes. people with 16GB ram, windows managed page file max may not be high enough for the game, I set it to 6000 max and it’s working fine now.
Internet is filled with complaints of the game crashing, and the devs haven’t given an advisory to increase page file size especially since the game is memory hop at ultra/extreme setting.