You're playing Watch Dogs 2 like any other day, when you accidentally get caught by Tezcas while trying to steal that one duffelbag full of cash.  They open fire on you, and instead of taking damage, your game crashes.

You reboot the game, and decide to try again.  This time, you go in with silenced weapons, and take them out before they can see you.  You eliminate all but one of them, but when you kill the last one, the game crashes again.  Except this time, it doesn't quit to desktop, and Ctrl+Alt+Delete doesn't work - you accept your fate and hold down the power button on your computer.

You continue to play the game, and every once in a while, someone in the game will fire a gun and the game crashes in this way.

Does this sound like something you struggle with?  If so, don't worry, it affects every single copy of the game that was ever released, and - despite what Ubisoft Support claims - it's actually a game bug, not a computer issue.  Not even the PS4 or Xbox One users are immune to it!  It's very random in nature, as some players will not experience it after years of play, and others will experience it every 5 minutes.  Even if you haven't heard of this bug before, you probably already know of it as the "guns crash".

It seems the problem was very simple, and Ubisoft could've very easily fixed it - it's something to do with blood effects on models.  When anyone gets shot with a lethal weapon, a blood decal is put on the location of the wound, but something bugs out and either temporarily or fully crashes your game.

This mod disables all of these blood effects, which completely prevents this kind of crash.  The sad part about this is that Ubisoft pushed out a patch that caused the game to forcefully disable online play if mods are installed, and there will never be a way around this.  Therefore, it's unfortunately limited to Singleplayer on PC, but hey, it's better than nothing.

While it's theoretically possible to install this mod on the console releases, the modding process for PS4 requires a modded console, meaning you can't connect to PSN whatsoever, and it's ludicrously difficult.  Additionally, Xbox One consoles can't be modded yet, so it's currently impossible for that platform.

To install this mod, simply extract the patch3.dat and patch3.fat files to the same location as all the other dat/fat pairs, which is in the data_win64 folder right next to the game's executable.  If you know how to merge mods, it should be compatible with all mods, as I don't believe any of them use this file.

Do note that other crashes in this game do exist, this one only fixes the crashes related to bullet impacts.  If you encounter a game crash to desktop immediately after a gunshot is fired, this mod installed, and your game has been otherwise perfectly stable with no hardware issues, tell me.  While this mod has been proven by myself and others to fully fix this crash, the random nature of the crash makes it difficult to test this mod.  It's very very very very unlikely that the guns crash will still happen with this mod installed.  I constantly get this crash, and ever since I installed it, the crashes have completely stopped.