Valorant, Riot Games' competitive tactical FPS, has been besieged by problems since the day of its launch. Now, it seems, those problems continue. Looks like Riot's anti-cheat software Vanguard - which is necessary for playing Valorant - has been blocking certain drivers. The problem is bad enough that Riot needed to release a hotfix to deal with it.
According to the official Valorant Twitter account, some drivers have been identified as "cheat-vulnerable", which means Vanguard blocks them automatically. The fix, according to Riot, will make most of the previously-blocked drivers work, although some "egregious ones" are still causing the game not to start. Riot doesn't provide a list of which "egregious" drivers those might be, so if you're still having issues, it seems like you'll need to wait for more info from the studio.
That has to be the end of Valorant's problems...right?
Nope. Some users are also complaining about Vanguard's .exe file not working. Twitter user @PhotonWolfsky (among many others) says they couldn't get vgc.exe to run, which meant that Vanguard couldn't initialize. If this happens, you won't be able to play Valorant, because the game depends on the anti-cheat software in order to work. PhotonWolfsky says the program "elevated itself above administrator" but that the file still wouldn't run manually. Apparently, the only fix for this issue is to uninstall and reinstall both Vanguard and Valorant, which isn't even working for everyone. Riot says it's looking into this problem, so it could be that we'll have a fix before too long.
This is just the latest in a long line of issues plaguing both Valorant and Vanguard. Just a couple of days ago, a Reddit user complained that Valorant and Vanguard had silently disabled his graphics card's cooling software, thus almost causing his hardware to overheat. Riot is going to have to do a lot of work on the optics of this situation to salvage Valorant prior to its projected summer 2020 full release. It's hard to imagine many people will want to buy a full release given how much controversy there has been over the game.
Have you had any of the above issues with Valorant or Vanguard? Let us know in the comments below!
