I have the same issue. Although I didn't notice any stability problems and most of my crashing went away after patch 1.04 I can't help but wonder why this game is using my cpu at full.

The last time I encountered this issue was from Dragon Age Origins. Hell it even broke my gpu. haha

Do you with high temperatures have Nvidia Hairworks on? Do you have a non-Nvidia or a slower Nvidia graphics card? If you have slower Nvidia, in Nvidia control panel you could force PhysX to be calculated on the GPU, auto might default to CPU on machines with slower graphics cards to utilize the system a bit better (use the CPU to max and have more GC power left for eye candy). Just a thought...

Check and make sure you don't have anything runninhg in the background. You should not be running @ 100%. As for the temp. that is a bit warm for just running the game. I would definiotely get off the stock cooler and get a good 3rd party cooler, such as a Cooler Master 212 EVO. I am using a Gelid Tranquillo on an i7 4770k @ 4.5 Ghz and my temps are below 50c when running the game ( Low 40's ).

Umm... I get 12.5%-25% at the most on my i7 4770K. I wish the game would have multicore support, but it seems to run on a single one all the time. Also only uses 2.5-3GB RAM like virtually any other poor console port.

Yeah. People are jumping on the Hex Cores and Octa cores and there are very few apps that have been optimized for Quad Core let alone 6 and 8 cores. I'm surorised this game wasn't though.

Its a standard console port. No surprise there.

High CPU usage is really a headache for a gamer. I found a best solution for get ride of this issue.

although this is an old thread i like to talk tech stuff so here goes...

-Games should never eat up your entire CPU unless the following scenarios:
-your cpu is weak/old and outdated/too slow?
-your graphic card is too strong and bottlenecking the cpu <this one can be measured>
<-You have leaking cpu power or in other words something else doing in the background that is eating power>

Though the original poster mentioned to have an i7 3770k and i assure there is no game on the planet that can eat up that cpu completely 100%...so it's not game related at all...