I'd imagine for most people trying to play this game, your crash is when the game is compiling shaders on startup. This issue existed since the Alpha tests during the mid 2024's, and persisted upon launch and into 2025.

The game has horrible coding. Probably offshored to Indian developers.

If you have an Intel CPU this might resolve the matter.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/17881/intel-extreme-tuning-utility-intel-xtu.html

https://images.steamusercontent.com/ugc/8552036289568127/8E3841A9FD7C750CEDE8A4607F24C4F57B843918/?imw=256&&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

Once installed, underclock your CPU's core performance ratio to 54 and apply. Run the game. Let it compile shaders.

Editing the Efficient Core Ratio down one notch also helps. Not always necessary.

Once completed, exit the game and you can reset your performance ratio back to 55 and efficient core ratio back to 43. or whatever your defaults were. You should not have to do this process again until, like I did, a new season (and intro in the menu screen) is released.

If your game still crashes while underclocking the CPU, it might help to FPS cap the game in the settings. I've seen some comments that the game, without FPS caps, is literally trying to run as many frames as possible until an eventual crash. It increases temps in your PC and causes, well, a crash.

Limit FPS and check temps with the Intel utility. As well as other available temp monitoring software. Like CPUID

I have an Intel i7-14700K running at 3.40 GHz. Which for early 2025 is still a really good CPU.

Why I (and many others) had to *underclock* our CPU's to get the game to compile shaders is a complete mystery. Like I said, horrible coding. And it doesn't seem like it'll be fixed anytime soon.

The only issues I personally had after this is the game crashing every 4 or 5 hours during play. If your PC is anything like mines, the solution is exiting for a minute or 2 and relaunching around the 4 hour mark.

Id suggest playing a match or two and then switching the utility presets back to how they were afterwards. If problems persist, you may have to use this method everytime you want to play. It is possible to put the tool back to its presets (while playing) AFTER shaders have compiled. So its purely a 'shader compiling' issue.

How this meshes with the new shader compiling method they've unveiled I do not know. Haven't tried it as it is still in an 'experimental' phase.