I've been posting for days now about a freeze that would occur when starting a new game. The 'fix' was to use -force-vulkan which allowed me to play, but still resulted in the occasional freeze. Well, after looking through the Steam community forums, and seeing someone talking about possible issues with overclocks, I removed the overclock on my 3080 Ti (done through MSI Afterburner) and sure enough, I can now start a game without -force-vulkan applied. No more freezes! So apparently, overclocked GPUs cause freezing issues in this game.

Hey,

Thank you for your finding, it's very informative. 

I'm not an expert, but from what i know, while overcloacking in the bios just "crank up" voltages, software overclocking fiddles with your GPU drivers, and that can have various (and kind of random) issues on how the differents game engines interact with them.

I'll let the concerned third-parties know about it. Thanks again <3