Game just exits to desktop

[Liquid]

I cant play the game. it loads fine, into the menus. I choose single player and sometimes get into the mission briefing...most of the time it just crashes to desktop when I try and launch the single player game. If I do get to the briefing it crashes when trying to load the mission. this happens every time. i am unable to play. I dont even have a clue to where to start troubleshooting. I have a good PC. RTX 3090 etc, loads of RAM etc.

[Jaiko 🐉]

I'm having the same issue as well.

[rtunie62]

My game locks up at the exact same point but I have been playing for 10+ hours before it started. Like I said, happens at the exact same spot in the mom cala mission EVERY time. Very frustrating.

[Jaiko 🐉]

Someone in another post suggested linking your EA account with your Steam account as a possible fix to this issue and it worked for me

[CheHansen]

Same issue
EA and Steam is linked
Just exits to desktop at random times

[Humunkulus_Hunk]

Please try the tips on the following webside, could more help then only linking EA account with steam.. https://www.drivethelife.com/how-to-fix-star-wars-squadrons-crashing-or-not-launching/#s7

[★Macman★]

I Reinstalled it which fixed it crashing at Cut Screens in VR. All I had done was change my Drive Letter which caused this to mess up.

[Jaiko 🐉]

Yay it's back to not working again...

[Humunkulus_Hunk]

...what you can also try is to re - login tio steam...

[Maichevsky]

can't start the game for a while now!

[Doozy]

TL;DR:

• Verify game files through Steam, firstly.
  
• If that doesn't work, try increasing the size of Windows's virtual memory / paging file to be (able to increase to) at least as large as the amount of RAM that you have in your system. In my case, Event Viewer would tell me an "out of memory" error had occurred, and increasing the amount of virtual memory available to the system fixed things, for me.
  
• Else, investigate with the help of Windows's Event Viewer to determine what errors, if any, occur at the time of the crash.

Ramble:

This might be similar to an issue that I had back when I first tried to play this game, which would Crash-to-Desktop between loading of missions and even transitions between sections, mid-mission. Aside from verifying the game files - which, I'll assume you've done - you might ought to look into whether you're running low on (virtual) memory.

Brief explanation: there's RAM, and then there's the pagefile (aka virtual memory). The pagefile lives on one or more of your storage devices (typically, C: by default). When RAM fills-up for various reasons, the pagefile gets used as a backup. The pagefile is much slower than RAM - especially when it's located on spinning hard drives and not SSDs - so, it can cause all kinds of problems (i.e. stuttering, hanging, etc.) when a game causes the operating system to fall-back to it while storing things into memory (because the system is waiting for data to be written slowly to the drives and back), causing it to play a lot of memory-tetris with itself. It's useful because slow-and-stuttery is better than simply locking-up or crashing when all the normal RAM is in-use, though this used to be much more an issue of decades-ago.
This is a bit of an oversimplification of what all the pagefile does, but it should suffice for those who don't know anything about it, for the purposes of this explanation. Now, normally, the Windows defaults regarding the pagefile are usually sufficient for most things - we don't usually have to think about or consider it. However, it may be the case that, at some point, the pagefile was set to max-out at a certain value, or Windows just can't seem to expand it fast enough, automatically, for some suddenly high demand - like, in our case, a game requesting far more memory than is available in the system, and then pitching a fit when it doesn't get it.

In my case, I think the requested amount of memory just for the game was something like 14GB, according to Event Viewer's report. My system has 16GB of RAM. However, my Windows etc. uses roughly 4GB to 6GB, just while idling; and, even more, if I've a browser etc. open at the same time, in background. Still, my pagefile should have adjusted to accommodate the spike in demand, right? Well... apparently, some time in the past, in some long-forgotten tweak I'd made to my system, I'd manually set a fixed value for the pagefile size, rather than automatic or a range - and only at 2 or 4GB, for whatever reason...oops! While that had been perfectly fine up until that point - and probably still would have been, if I'd had 32GB of RAM instead of 16GB, perhaps - it was altogether not enough for this game, which seems quite memory hungry (although, that's many modern games these days, I guess). Further, memory usage is worse with certain graphics settings selected; so, many folks might have thought some tweaks of the video settings had solved their problems, when it really might have been something like this.

Anyway, so, the fix for these symptoms in my case was simply to adjust Windows's virtual memory settings. Ensuring that the drive(s) for the paging file is located on SSDs-only for speed (though hard drives are fine, just not ideal), I set a custom size such that the pagefile could be anywhere from 2GB to 16GB, rather than 2GB to 2GB, as before; and, voila, all my constant crashes went away! (You could probably just set it to "System managed," as well, but I didn't know if Windows would cap itself in some way, if left to its own devices.) So, definitely give this a try - especially if you're trying to game with 8GB of RAM or something. If anything, doing this shouldn't cause you any issues, and it's a reversible change.

How to Adjust Pagefile:

There's various ways to navigate to the panel in which you do this adjustment, in Windows 10 (and probably still similar in 11), but here's one way:

1. Open Settings from Windows, select "System," scroll-down to and select "About" on the left panel.
   
2. On the right, under "Related Settings," click "Advanced system settings" or "System protection" - both should open the same "System Properties" window.
   
3. Select the "Advanced" tab. Under the "Performance" section, click "Settings..."
   
4. In this "Performance Options" window, select the "Advanced" tab.
   
5. In the "Virtual memory" section at the bottom, select "Change..."

From here, adjust your settings in this "Virtual Memory" window to your preference. Your needs may vary. To manually adjust things, you'll have to uncheck the box at the top that tells Windows to manage the paging file size for all drives. Then, you can adjust paging file settings on a per-drive basis. Ideally, you only want the paging file(s) to exist on SSDs in your system rather than any slower, spinning HDDs. Select a drive you want to adjust, tweak its settings, and then click "Set." When all your changes are set and you like the setup, click OK and then Accept if/when Windows asks you to reboot to apply the changes.

In my case, I've 4 volumes available to me: C, D, E, and F. C and F are SSDs, so I set D and E to "No paging file" while C and F are set to "Custom size" of 2048 initial and 16384 maximum (which is 2GB to 16GB). Windows then starts out only using 2GB and increases as-needed, up to my maximums. If you've a tendency to accidentally max-out your hard drive usage sometimes, though (tsk tsk - stop that!), then you might opt to set the custom size to 16384-16384, instead, so that it just keeps a full 16GB all to itself and doesn't run the risk of trying to expand while having no room with which to expand. c:

Aside from that, I suppose it'd be good to try shooting for a minimum "total" amount of memory. In my case, 16GB RAM + 16GB pagefile seemed to do the trick, while 16GB RAM + 2or4GB pagefile did not. If you've 32GB of RAM available, you might never have this issue. If you do, try 8GB or 16GB pagefile. If you've 8GB of RAM...it's a bit of a struggle these days, but perhaps try 16GB up to 32GB for the pagefile, to see if that resolves things. You'll have a worse time than others, but it might actually be playable, then.

Closing Thoughts/Suggestions:

If adjusting the pagefile doesn't seem to help, I definitely suggest checking out the Windows Event Viewer to see if you can suss out any possible explanations. I've already rambled enough, here, so I won't be giving a detailed explanation of how to do that like I did with the pagefile explanation, but there should be plenty of explanations on how to do that, elsewhere online.

Since the crash happens within the game when you try to progress from the mission briefing to the actual gameplay, it sounds to me like something not loading correctly (i.e. corrupted game files, fixed by verifying), out-of-memory crash (with spike in demand due to going from an otherwise-simple briefing room and hangar to the game-proper). or something like a graphics card issue (drivers, power demand, unstable overclock, etc.). Maybe even something running in the background interfering with things - try turning off Steam overlay, Origin overlay, and/or any of various applications that chill in the task bar like NZXT/Razer/Steelseries etc. in my case, and maybe even MSI afterburner/RivaTuner if you're running it, to see if it may be the culprit somehow. Ensure your temps are good, too, obviously - watch it with HWMonitor etc. to ensure the heat's not suddenly spiking or something.

This is about everything I can think of off the top of my (currently, obviously-over-caffeinated) noggin. There's a bunch more fixes posted in various places to maybe try out, if none of these work. If you give these things a try, do be sure to test things one at a time so you can identify exactly which fix helps you, to help others who might come across this thread. c: Hope any of this helps!

[Plissken]

You can also try this (worked for me): Use the "cmd"-windows-tool with admin rights and type sfc /scannow the check for damaged windows files. It found some and repaired it. I had this problem some time ago with the game SCUM. Easy Anticheat kicks you out of the game. Game runs now fine again, no crashes since 15min into Mission 7.

[Doozy]

^ that's a very good one too, to troubleshoot lots of different things. Helps catch all sorts of errors that might occur because of corrupt or missing Windows files c: I've similarly fixed an intermittent issue with that tool

Edit: I actually just ran it on a whim on laptop and found errors :v definitely worth using it occasionally just-'cause

[Humunkulus_Hunk]

@doozy and plissken thx for your explanations

[Humunkulus_Hunk]

It seems that GPU Tweak from Asus is a squadrons start disturbing software, but i have to try out few days more, now im with MSI Afterburner - good so far. On both software no Game overlay was used - lets see.....

[Doozy]

Welcome! And, I'm glad you've found something that seems to fix things for you, thus-far c: