Red Dead Redemption 2 is Having A Miserable PC Launch

Red Dead Redemption 2 was officially released for the PC yesterday and, it’s pretty safe to say at this point, that the launch is proving to be something of an unmitigated disaster. While some users have been able to play the game without seemingly any problems, they are the lucky few.

Why? Well, a huge number of people can’t even get the game to load up even nearly 24-hours after it officially ‘came out’.

At present, those experiencing problems largely fall into two camps. Those who are having the Rockstar Games Launcher itself crash when attempting to launch the game and those who have the game crash at the load-up screen. For those who are actually able to access the game, however, they also are reporting a number of issues including permanent loading screens and graphical/audio glitches.

The good news is that if you have been experiencing launch problems, a new update to the Rockstar Games Launcher may allow you to finally play the game. The bad news is, even this fix isn’t working for everyone!

Rockstar Games is Working To Fix The Problems

In the Twitter post above, Rockstar Games seems to think that they may have fixed the main issue of people not being able to boot the game. For a number of users, however, including myself, the problems are still persisting.

Even despite the update, I’m still getting the exact same error message below. Are there any workarounds to the problem, though? Well, yes and no.

Potential Fixes

If you are experiencing this problem too, then at the time of writing, there are a number of ‘fixes’ (both fan-based and direct from Rockstar) that may help get the game running. Based on my own experience and research, I’ll chip in to tell you what success I’ve seen.

• Update the launcher to the latest version (In fairness, a fix that does seem to be having success for a lot of users)
• Disable any anti-virus software you have running (Some report that this works, others not)
• Add the Rockstar Launcher and Red Dead Redemption 2 folders to your anti-virus’ ‘Exceptions’ list (Again, a mixed bag of results).
• Set both the Rockstar Launcher and Red Dead Redemption 2 executable to run in ‘administrator’ mode while selecting “Disable Fullscreen Optimization” (No notable differences reported by users)
• Ensure you have the latest graphics card drivers installed (Nvidia 441.12 – AMD 19.11.1.) – (This does seem to be a required step, but people who have done this still seem to have the problem).
• Check Windows manually for any new system updates.

If any of these do work for you, then kudos!

You’re Not Alone!

In all honesty, having tried all of the above (with a few more homebrewed ideas either in progress or failed) the bottom line is that despite even the update to the official Rockstar Launcher, many people are still unable to play the game.

If you’re in this boat, then I can at least confirm to you that you are not alone!

A Rockstar technical support worker has confirmed to me that they are aware that the ‘fix’ hasn’t worked for everyone and they are still plugging away at trying to get to the root of the issue. My best theory at the moment is that this error is due to some kind of hardware conflict. Albeit AMD, Intel and Nvidia (and every combination of) users all seem to be in the same boat here.

For the moment, however, if you are on the fence on buying this game, don’t get it right now. I’d say, at best, it’s a 50/50 if it will run on your PC.

What do you think? Have you been able to get Red Dead Redemption 2 to work on your PC? If not, what problems are you having? – Let us know in the comments!