I had a similar error, computer crashed, was a fresh character so it hadn’t autosaved. When I try to reload the game it gave a “syntax error in artifacts.gsav” and dropped back to desktop. “artifacts.gsav” was completely empty when I opened it up in wordpad. No save because I had to delete save folder to get the game to work again.
I ran into the same, but in my case my hard drive was full, which is a pathological case I don’t expect to be able to handle. Reporting the failed save, and even better leaving the existing save intact in case it can’t write the new one are nice to haves though.
I suspect your crash was during a save though, is 1185 in the span that doesn’t have that NPC null check?