The most reliable solution is to force the game to redownload the corrupted file. Sometimes a simple "Verify Integrity" check fails to spot a partially corrupted file that still exists on the disk.
In the early days of gaming, every texture, sound effect, and 3D model was a separate file loose on the hard drive. Today, however, games are massive. Mafia II , for example, contains tens of thousands of individual assets. If the game engine had to search through thousands of loose files every time you turned a corner, loading times would be excruciating.
Open the folder containing bigfile.000 . Look for: Unable To Open Bigfile Bigfile.000
: You have a split file set. Do not modify them. Proceed to Step 4.
If you are seeing the error , you aren't alone. This specific error is a notorious hurdle for fans of the Tomb Raider series (including Legend , Anniversary , Rise , and Shadow ) and Deus Ex: Human Revolution . It usually means the game engine—often the Crystal Dynamics Engine—cannot access the primary archive containing its assets. The most reliable solution is to force the
Why does this happen? The reasons usually fall into three categories: Security interference, Permission lockouts, or Corruption.
Modern antivirus suites are suspicious of programs that try to access large, compressed archives all at once. To an antivirus program, a game trying to unpack 10GB of data rapidly looks a lot like ransomware encrypting your hard drive. Consequently, the antivirus blocks the game from accessing Bigfile.000 , resulting in the crash. Today, however, games are massive
Once you have the merged file, you will have a single large file with a proper extension (e.g., .iso , .zip , .vmdk , .mkv , .exe ). Now you can open it with the appropriate software:
Here is a structured overview of why this happens and how to resolve it. 🔍 Root Causes of the Error