Alright, so I wanted to jump into Wuthering Waves earlier today, but guess what? It just kept crashing right after I started it up. Super annoying.
First thing I did was the usual routine. You know, check if my graphics drivers needed an update. They were actually up-to-date, which surprised me a little. So, that wasn’t it. I restarted my machine anyway, just because sometimes that magically fixes things. Nope. Still crashed.
Okay, plan B. Maybe some game files got messed up somehow? Stuff happens. I opened the game launcher, looked around for a bit, and found the ‘Repair’ or ‘Verify Files’ option. Clicked that and let it do its thing. Took a few minutes, downloaded some bits. Felt hopeful. Launched the game again… crash. Right at the same spot.
Digging a bit deeper
At this point, I started thinking about other stuff running on my PC. Sometimes overlays, like the one from Discord or my graphics card software, can cause headaches with games. So, I systematically shut down everything that wasn’t essential. Exited Discord, turned off the NVIDIA overlay, closed any background monitoring tools. Just wanted the game and the OS running. Tried launching Wuthering Waves one more time. Still crashed. Damn.
This was getting frustrating. What else could it be? I checked Windows updates, made sure everything was installed there. It was. Then I thought about my antivirus. Sometimes, they get a bit aggressive and quarantine a file they shouldn’t. Went into the antivirus settings and added the entire Wuthering Waves installation folder to the exceptions list. Gave it another go. You guessed it – crash.
The fix, finally
I was almost ready to just reinstall the whole thing, but I remembered having a similar weird crashing issue with a different game a long while back. It turned out to be something about the Visual C++ Redistributables. These are like little helper programs that games need to run properly.
So, I navigated to where Wuthering Waves is installed on my hard drive. Usually, inside the game’s main folder, there’s another folder, often called something like `_CommonRedist` or similar, containing installers for these things.
- I found a `vcredist` folder inside the game’s directory.
- Inside that, there were a few installer files, usually for different versions (like x64 and x86).
- I ran each one. When the installer popped up, it gave options like ‘Install’ or ‘Repair’. Since they were likely already installed, I chose ‘Repair’ for each one.
- Let them finish repairing.
- Just to be safe, I did one final restart of my computer.
Took a deep breath, clicked the Wuthering Waves icon again. Watched it load up… and it actually got past the point where it always crashed! The game loaded into the main menu perfectly fine.
Success! Seems like one of those C++ thingamajigs got corrupted somehow. Running the repair fixed whatever was broken. It was a bit of a roundabout way to get there, trying all the other stuff first, but glad it’s working now without a full reinstall. Sometimes the fix is simpler than you think, just gotta poke around a bit.
