Updated: March 21, 2025
Hear me out. Of all the weird problems I've ever encountered playing computer games, this one is the weirdest of them all. A friend of mine and I decided to play Wreckfest. It's a very sweet, fun, soft physics racing title. Splendid. As always, my friend would start a server, and I would join. Only this time, his router was misbehaving for some odd reason, and when I tried to connect, Wreckfest crashed. Not only that, it popped a most bizarre dialog window of all. No title. It just said: Fatal error B - no extra punctuation. Even the OK button to acknowledge the prompt wasn't a proper OK. It only read O. Dismissing the error any which way would always result in the game crash. Nothing in the logs, whatsoever.
And so, seemingly, I was stuck. My friend and I decided to try to troubleshoot the problem, and it took a lot of tweaking, witchcraft, and some educated guesses to get around the issue. If you're one of the unfortunate souls to have encountered a similar phenomenon, perhaps this tutorial may help you. After me, drivers.
First, what didn't work
OK, so my friend and I started troubleshooting this, together, step by step:
- Restarting the game, and/or restarting Steam and playing again didn't seem to help.
- Router reboot (after we figured it was the initial culprit), plus a repeat of the above didn't help.
- Running an integrity check on the Wreckfest game files through Steam didn't help.
What did work then?
Next, I decided to try the singleplayer mode. Basically, I wanted to see whether doing anything on my own, without connecting to my friend's server, actually worked. Perhaps the game was totally corrupted, or maybe not, so I wanted to rule those options out.
- Trying a custom event didn't help with the problem. It worked, but it didn't resolve the multiplayer issue.
- Playing a career challenge (any one) didn't help. The game worked correctly, and it did not crash. I then tried to connect to my friend's server, and still, the game would hang, throw the popup and promptly bork itself without any other useful information.
- Playing a tournament game ... helped! Thereafter, connecting to my friend's server worked!
The only question is, why?
My guess is, since my friend's router misbehaved, something really odd happened when I tried to connect. My friend saw it as my ping skyrocketing to about 10 seconds, before I "disconnected". At that point, my game state probably got corrupt. But not the game files, only my player state, so to speak. And going via the tournament mode, which is "sort of" singleplayer but online in a way, seemed to have restored whatever internal state went bust. So here we are.
Last thing, in Windows 10, every time you start Wreckfest, you will see a stupid Game Bar error in the event log. I noticed this, but then, it's been there forever, since day one. It had not affected my ability to play Wreckfest, and I don't think I can blame it for the weird crash we saw above. It is an unnecessary error, though, because I don't use Game Bar, and the system shouldn't try to be "modern" and "stupid".
The server Windows.Gaming.GameBar.PresenceServer.Internal.PresenceWriter did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.
Conclusion
I told you. A weird, weird error. I'm not 100% sure why and how, but my guess is that this is a combo of server connection state plus cloud game save state corruption, which happened when Wreckfest tried to connect to a host that had networking issues, and which resulting in some malformed traffic and the subsequent crash. I have zero data to corroborate this theory, but it seems this would be the case, considering how I fixed it.
Well, I guess that's all there is to it. If I helped, you're welcome. Hopefully, now you can go back to having fun in Wreckfest, driving silly cars in a silly way, and enjoy the therapeutic effect of wanton destruction that only demolition derbies can bring. It is time to end the article. Take care, folkses.
Cheers.