everytime I'm playing Control Standard Edition it crashes when I press the menu or escape...

Hello Jess, My name is Jesse. I'm an Independent Advisor and a member of the Microsoft community and I'd love to assist you today.

First, please check and confirm that your PC meets the minimum specs or surpass the minimum system requirements for the game:

CPU: Intel Core i5-4690 / AMD FX-4350 or better

CPU SPEED: Info

RAM: 8 GB

OS: Windows 7, 64-bit

VIDEO CARD: Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 / AMD Radeon R9 280x or better

PIXEL SHADER: 5.0

VERTEX SHADER: 5.0

DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 3072 MB

Above is the minimum requirement for the game, but for a better experience I'll recommend the specs below:

CPU: Intel Core i5-7600K / AMD Ryzen 5 1600x or better

CPU SPEED: Info

RAM: 16 GB

OS: Windows 10, 64-bit

VIDEO CARD: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 / AMD Radeon RX 580 or better (RTX 2060 for Ray-Tracing)

PIXEL SHADER: 5.1

VERTEX SHADER: 5.1

DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 3072 MB

If you meet the requirements, please see below to modify the game settings to fix things:

- Open the Control application and then go to its Options menu quickly.

- Assuming you are under the Display tab, you have to set Display Mode to Borderless. Check the options in the drop-down menu for Resolution and then choose the minimum one.

Do the same thing for Render Resolution.

- Click on the checkbox for Vsync to deselect this parameter.

- Click on the drop-down menu for Quality Preset to see the available options. Choose Low.

- Choose the Low or Medium options for these parameters too: Far Object Detail (FOD), Texture Resolution, Texture Filtering, Shadow Resolution, and the other functions or features that matter.

- You must set Ray Tracing Preset to Off.

- Save the changes you just made.

- Restart your pc

- Try to play the game on the new settings.

Hello, you have closed the question but as other people are having the issue, are you saying all these people xboxs’ are faulty? When I play with the elite controller it crashes. But playing on the standard controller I have zero crashing so far

Just press escape on the keyboard, this will remove the pop up window and allow the controller to be used.. the pop up window will show up again and then press B on your controller and it will go, but it has to be escape then B as pressing escape again
just allows it to pop up again for some reason.

I'm using a steering wheel and a controller but it isn't connecting when I press the menu button

For me it turned out to be the ASUS Armoury Crate software. I disabled it all, and the game started working again. I'm going to see if there are updates out that will allow me to play Control without having to kill Armory Crate and associated services before playing.

I know you found it was an Alienware software package, but I'm leaving this comment here for any ASUS ROG/TUF users who are experiencing this maddening hang when playing Game Pass Control for PC.

**Edit**

I'm editing this post to say with certainty that the file causing the problems is ArmourySWagent. Updates did not fix the hang, but as soon as I kill the process in Task Manager the game begins to function again.

**Edit 2**

I can't exactly reproduce the steps needed to get past the loading screen reliably.

Here's the best I can figure with my setup:

• Log out and log back in for a fresh start on everything

• Open task manager and kill ArmourySWagent

• Go to my notification area and exit Corsair iCUE

• Start Control without an xbox controller connected

• Use the keyboard to press enter to get past the initial menu

• Then plug in xbox controller and continue game (controller not necessary - I like to play with one)

There might still be lockups after this point, but the above is the most reliable way for me to get into the game menus to play. It seems that anything that links RGB devices prevents Control from reading keyboard or controller inputs when it gets to its menu.

**Edit 3**

Crashes in-game seem to come from MS's use of XVD drives to hold the game files. Crashes are generally associated with autosaves. Looking at system logs pointed at surprise removals of drives I don't have installed, and Device Manager shows 1 or more XVD drives. When disabled the game cannot find the storage media and fails to launch.
I am not finding a remedy to the XVD drive issue as nobody seems to know much about these encrypted drives Microsoft uses for GamePass games.

It is frustrating playing on a high-end PC and having a good game marred by constant crashes and having to ritually log out to try and recover my system.

**Final edit for now**

I found in a forum for Microsoft Flight Simulator that they recommended manually changing the size of your page file in order to prevent any kind of memory errors that might be causing crashes. I set Windows max pagefile size as the minimum, and double that as maximum, and restarted to apply the change. After the restart not even my elaborate ritual to launch the game works.
I put everything back and let windows manage the page file. It did not revert to letting me back into the game. I'm not sure if this is just coincidental, though, since I made these changes after my last game crash. It's possible that there was some data corruption that occurred after the last crash, and I'm dead in the water. Either way, I currently can't play the game.

After spending more time doing IT to run the game than actually playing it I am currently done trying.