almost immediate freeze and crash

Every time I load the game up this morning, mere seconds after the GGG splash screen, the game will freeze and crash. This would happen from time to time, only while loading into the game after character selection, and all I would do previously is retry and it would work after 1-3 restarts of the game. This morning, however, it will freeze and crash every single time. It's so short of a time before crashing that I can't even check settings to see if I need to change something. What is going on?