Random crashing in Thorshafn

[Blootletter]

Just started playing, followed all the installation steps including the firewall / windows defender whitelisting bits, directx9, etc.

Across 2Chaos toons now, as soon as I cross the bridge from the first quest hub area into Thorshafn (burning village), the game silent crashes to desktop. No error message, no lingering exe in task manager, just stops running. If I stay on the quest hub side of the river, runs fine indefinitely. Cross over the bridge, even not fighting enemies, crashes.

My rig is modern, running an RTX 3070 with plenty of ram, etc. I have the graphics turned to the min, including nameplates, effects, shadows off, draw distance, etc, literally everything to the lowest setting or "fastest framerate" setting and it still crashes.

Going to try and spin up an Order toon to see if it's just that area as I suspect maybe it's something to do with the fire effects of the burning houses? Otherwise I'm at a loss on what else to check. I followed the post on here with all the other stuff to improve performance etc but I either already had the recommendation set or I don't have any of the offending addons being mentioned (I in fact have no addons installed yet)

Halp!