Re: EA WRC not starting after 1.9 patch

Make sure Secure Boot is enabled in your BIOS. That's what was causing my crash

My secure boot is enabled but it crashes since 1.9.

enabled secure boot, hoping it would solve the issue....it's not for me. Game starts in menu but when you go to any rally mode it crashes back to windows

Hey there,

Thank you very much for your reports. I have escalated this to the game team, but they will need more information. Can you share your IDs in a private message?

-Groguet

It would appear this issue happens for most when the game is not installed on the C: drive. I have the same issue but unfortunately do not have enough space on my C: drive to move the game.

Can you advise me on a work around for this?

With a lot of time and effort i managed to free up 90Gb on my C-drive.

Reinstalled the game on my C-drive ( which is an M-2) through steam, but the game still won't start. It shows the splash screen twice and then crashes

Game still doesn't work. Only splashscreen.

Also Anticheat FAQ page still error 500.

Thought i'd link this in - SennaMental on steam community forums found that renaming the openXR folder at "\steamapps\common\EA SPORTS WRC\Engine\Binaries\ThirdParty"  allowed their game to start.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1849250/discussions/0/6361980659846943370/

Your solution does not work for me.

I almost believed it ☹️

same issue here, but on VR. I used to play perfectly with Windows Mixed Reality, now the game won't open in VR with WMR, only with Steam VR, but it's buggy and I can't get into stages, the game crashes. I have it installed in my C drive, but it's frustrating I can't play it anymore in VR.

WTF!!! thx you @nbates66 that works for me! But I really need to forget VR, that didn't work before, and now it doesn't propose me to use it 😃
Please @EA_Groguet , what is this joke with VR? We are in 2024, all simulations need VR, this is absolutly a game changer!!! And OpenXR is absolutly necessary to have a real optimisation!

Having same issue, try to start game looks like it's trying to start then exits.. check eventlogs and see the

EAAntiCheatService
Failed to obtain Origin directory

was working yesterday and won't launch today..

I have the same problem... please FIX ASAP

Yep, sad story. I can't run the game neither on my Win11 machine nor on my SteamDeck. I contacted EA support to figure out what was possible and after getting through two different agents asking me similar questions (similar to what you get if you call your cable support, them asking you if you plugged your TV) and giving random instructions such as stopping system services from Intel used by the cpu/mb, the second agent ended up telling me, quote "you bought the game almost a year ago we cannot support you further".

Ok ?! 😮

Have the same issue. Clearly as a result of anti cheat. Game is completely broken now and no fix in sight. What a pity, especially with the new DLC on the horizon.

No point in buying it if I can't even get the game to launch.

Posting this on behalf of an EA WRC discord member called Pepper 

I have been struggling with this issue since the 1.9 patch as well. I notice there are a few different ways in which the game does not start for people. For me, I get to the start of the fullscreen EA logo splash, then it instantly crashes to desktop without an error given.
I have already tried
* Verifying the installation.
* Full uninstall and reinstall
* Renaming the movie file that runs the EA logo splash, but that just makes it crash earlier
* Turning off all services and startup programs
* Checked if SecureBoot is enabled (it is)
* Checked event logs for errors
* Wanted to run ProcMon while starting the game, but the anti cheat spyware does not allow this
* Renaming some folder that a user said can fix the issue
* Every other suggestion offered by users that I've read but forgot about by now

Saw this potential fix posted on Reddit. Tried it and manually running "EAAntiCheatGameServiceLauncher.exe" worked for me. Haven't had a single problem launching the game from Steam since doing that.

• Make sure the game is installed on your C: drive

• Go to C: Program Files (x86): Steam: steamapps: common: EA SPORTS WRC: WRC: Binaries: Win64

• Right click on "EAAntiCheatGameServiceLauncher.exe"

• Select "Run as administrator" (not sure if running as admin is even necessary, but better safe than sorry).

• The EA Sports WRC pop-up should appear, with the little white loading bar at the bottom. The bar should load, and after this some new files should be dumped in the folder. After that, the EA Sports WRC pop up should disappear.

• Right click WRC.exe and "run as administrator".

After that you should be able to exit the game, and from then launch the game normally from Steam using the green "Play" button. I've tried launching the game from Steam three times and every time it now launches without issue.

It seems that the files that manually running the "EAAntiCheatGameServiceLauncher.exe" as detailed above dumps into the folder named above are required for the game to launch properly since Patch 1.09.

Hi @waz84 

When you first encountered the problem was the game installed on your C:\ drive?

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@waz84 wrote:

Saw this potential fix posted on Reddit. Tried it and manually running "EAAntiCheatGameServiceLauncher.exe" worked for me. Haven't had a single problem launching the game from Steam since doing that.

• Make sure the game is installed on your C: drive

• Go to C: Program Files (x86): Steam: steamapps: common: EA SPORTS WRC: WRC: Binaries: Win64

• Right click on "EAAntiCheatGameServiceLauncher.exe"

• Select "Run as administrator" (not sure if running as admin is even necessary, but better safe than sorry).

• The EA Sports WRC pop-up should appear, with the little white loading bar at the bottom. The bar should load, and after this some new files should be dumped in the folder. After that, the EA Sports WRC pop up should disappear.

• Right click WRC.exe and "run as administrator".

---

Having over 30 years of experience using a computer as a developper, I tried all of that before coming here and more after the official support asked me to do things that have nothing to do with the game nor the anti-cheat. Still, it will close immediately after the splash screen. But that's what you get when you use kernel level process, it messes with things that are hard to identify (I mean if anything 19 of July should have been a wake up call for lot of developpers).

I am not planning to test every single one of my drivers, services and hardware pieces to see which one conflict with the game. Not my job. Especially when all was working fine for 7 months and nothing changed on my end.

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@EA_Groguet wrote:

Hey there,

Thank you very much for your reports. I have escalated this to the game team

-Groguet

---

@EA_Groguet, out of curiosity I checked further and the same issue is affecting all of EA games basically, whatever the launcher, whatever the systems, so it is linked to the anti-cheat and whatever conflict it may have with the end user machines, nothing to do with the game version. The game team can most likely do nothing about this. Reach out to the Anticheat developpers so that get fixed accross the board for all games. Their kernel level programming issues are going to ruin EA customer potential overall if nothing is done. I guess we all saw what kernel level bad code can do a month ago, right ?

most of their sales are probably on consoles, while this seems to be a PC related problem for those of us who run stuff on different parts of their harddrive while the C: only players seem not to be affected, like the consoles. Still waiting for some sort of solution, meanwhile I'll fire up Sebastian Loeb Rally again, lol.

No, it was installed on D: drive.

But moving it to my C: drive alone did nothing. Tried moving it to C:, deleting the game completely and re-installing on C:, and nothing.

Only thing that worked for me was the fix I posted that I found on Reddit.

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@WetJones wrote:

Hi @waz84 

When you first encountered the problem was the game installed on your C:\ drive?

---

Got it thanks! Trying to find a fix that doesn't involve the C: drive as I don't have enough space, guess I'll try it anyway without that step.

* out of luck probably though. What a joke.

I have re-installed the game on the C-drive, run it as admin.
Also tried running the anti-cheat as admin first. 

Still no go.

Is there any official response from EA that they are investigating this issue or are they just scamming us ?