Eureka! We’ve had a breakthrough moment with Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC, and finally managed to get the game up-and-running on our test bench. Facing a seemingly common issue with the game at launch, the “exited unexpectedly” bug, and after trying every RDR2 fix recommend by Rockstar to no avail, we finally bit the bullet and entirely rebuilt our gaming PC and reinstalled Windows – and now Red Dead Redemption 2 works. It’s not the most chill solution, we’ll admit. To get past the now infamous boot error, we had to tear down our entire test bench and replace its components – twice. The first time we tried an AMD build, which seemingly made no difference to the issue. The second time we used Windows’ reset functionality to wipe our entire drive, which seemed to do the trick. That would suggest something innate to some OS installations is preventing the game from booting on some users’ machines. We couldn’t locate the exact root error, however. Before saying “fuck it” and totally wiping the drive, we had attempted all potential solutions recommended by Rockstar on its support page and more.