How to fix the “A critical error has occurred” message in Valorant

No game is without errors, and Valorant is no different. Riot Games’ popular hero shooter has been around for a while, but even the most robust games get hit with the occasional malfunction. One of the most infuriating errors is the “A critical error has occurred” message. So vague, yet so damning. Here’s what you need to know about what to do when you get the “A critical error has occurred” message in Valorant.

Fixing Valorant’s A Critical Error has Occurred message

This error sometimes crops up when trying to start up Valorant — rather than loading into your game of choice, you’ll be stuck with a message saying something along the lines of “A critical error has occurred, and the process must be terminated” before the game crashes. There are a handful of things you can try to resolve this issue, but you might not be able to do this because something is happening with the servers for Riot Games.

Related: How to fix Error Code 59 in Valorant

Restart your computer

The first thing you want to do is restart your computer. This is a good solution to try and clear out any unwanted applications or programs you might not have closed when attempting to play the game. In addition, this is a good way to refresh your computer and then jump back into a Valorant match with your friends.

Uninstall any incompatible apps

Sometimes the different apps on your computer don’t work well with one another. Some Valorant players enjoy having access to companion apps like Blitz, which keeps track of their stats and other information, and Razer Cortex, which boosts the game’s performance, but they don’t always work that well together, especially after patches and updates. Riot Games recommends uninstalling any apps interacting with Valorant if you run into a critical error at launch. This might be a good practice to do following any Valorant updates that go through.

Running Valorant with administrator privileges

If you continue encountering issues, another solution is to give yourself administrator permissions before playing Valorant. You can do this by clicking the right mouse button on the Valorant program before you start it and clicking the “Run as administrator” option. You might already do this for other games you have on your computer.

Alternatively, you might want to right-click on the game icon on your desktop and click the “Properties,” and then go to the “Compatibility” tab, where you can choose to run this program as an administrator at all times. This is a good way to ensure that every time you click to start the program, it always verifies you as the administrator before you play.

Update your graphics drivers

Having updated graphics drivers isn’t just a way to make sure you’re making the most of that crystal-clear 4K monitor. A lot of the time, driver updates help with compatibility between various components and systems, and ignoring updates can lead to more significant issues than just some botched ray tracing.

As such, it’s a good idea to update your graphics drivers if you’re experiencing problems with games like Valorant. AMD and Nvidia have dedicated support and driver download sections. Still, you can check out the Device Manager on your computer to find relevant info and try and automatically update your drivers.

Valorant servers

The final thing you want to check is if the Valorant servers are encountering any issues. You can do this by visiting the Valorant support page on the Riot Games support website or seeing if anything has been posted on the Valorant Twitter page. The server page on Riot Games’ website might be the quicker option, though. Unfortunately, if problems are happening with the Valorant game servers, there’s little you can do about this, and you will need to wait until those have been resolved before attempting to play Valorant.