Red Dead Redemption 2 Still Crashing After Applying Day-1 Patch? Rockstar Offers Advice
PC players waited a little over a year for Red Dead Redemption 2 to migrate over from consoles to their platform of choice, and yesterday that wait came to an end. Rockstar's western-themed hit is now available on PC. Unfortunately, for all of the graphical and technical enhancements the PC port brought with it, some annoying bugs saddled up for the ride, leading to a day-1 patch.
Many players took to Reddit and social media to complain about RDR2 crashing when trying to launch the game. To Rockstar's credit, its v1.0.9.164 patch came rather quick. Here are the release notes...
- Fixed an issue that resulted in the Rockstar Games Launcher returning the error "The Rockstar Games Launcher failed to initialize" on startup
- Fixed an issue that resulted in the Rockstar Games Launcher preload decryption getting stuck and not completing
- Fixed an issue that resulted in the Rockstar Games Launcher returning the error "The Rockstar Games Launcher exited unexpectedly" when launching Red Dead Redemption 2
- Fixed an issue that resulted in crashes when starting the Rockstar Games Launcher from the Epic Games Launcher
- Fixed an issue that resulted in the Rockstar Games Launcher returning the error "Unable to launch game, please verify your game data" when launching Red Dead Redemption 2 from the Epic Games Launcher
For some, the patch resolved the problem(s) they were having. However, it appears that problems still persist for others. At the time of this writing, out of the 530 people who bothered to vote on whether they found the patch notes article helpful, only 101 voted "yes"—429 clicked the "no" button.
As far as we are aware, Rockstar has not announced that another patch is coming, though it seems inevitable for a game this large and popular. In the meantime, however, the developer does have a tip. It essentially boils down to "update your graphics drivers."
The other tip is to run RDR2.exe as an administrator.
- Open the Rockstar Games Launcher
- Select Settings
- Select Red Dead Redemption 2 under My installed games
- Select Open under View Installation Folder
- Right-Click on RDR2
- Select Properties
- Under the Compatibility Tab
- Select Run this Program as an Administrator and Disable Full Screen Optimization
- Click OK
- Return to the Games Menu in the Rockstar Games Launcher
- Launch the game
Only 649 out of 3,494 people who voted found Rockstar's support article outlining these tips helpful, so it would seem some gamers are simply out of luck for the time being. Hopefully a subsequent patch comes quick to resolve these initial hiccups.
